UL’s got you covered
AS a registered student of the University of Limerick I still get its emails. I get the ones about lost USB keys, about on-campus bike mechanics and about international buddy programmes. I get them all and, like everyone else, I ignore every last one of them.
But last week I got an email impossible to ignore, an email so alarming it should have been heralded by the blare of a klaxon.
It was urgent they said, of great importance, not to be deleted, not to be ignored. Fearing the worst, I did as instructed, clicking into the urgent email, expecting to discover that the Stables had run dry, that Brown Thomas had died, or someone had tried to ski down the ski slopes. But it was worse than that, much worse.
There was an outbreak. An outbreak no less.
It wasn’t the winter vomiting bug, or the flu, or even chickenpox. Nor was it SARS, foot and mouth or the Black Death.
It was Gonorrhoea. It was Chlymadia. STIs, out there, free and loose, on campus, ready to crawl into our nether regions and eat us alive, from the inside out.
Crikey.
I read on, panicking now, my unborn children bidding me a tearful farewell as I resigned myself to a life of monastic chastity. “It is possible to have these conditions without having any type of symptoms.”
What? That hardly seemed fair. I didn’t deserve this; to be cursed by this silent, invisible disease, cut down in my prime through no fault of my own.
The next line did nothing to assuage my growing hysteria: “If you have had unprotected sex or have any concerns we would strongly advise you to contact the Student Health Centre or your G.P.”
A timeline wasn’t specified. Nor a location. Were they asking if I’d ever had unprotected sex or just recently? Did the warning apply solely to on-campus rumpy pumpy or was stuff I got up to in the privacy of my own home included?
It was only when I reflected upon the email, and its intended recipients, that I began to calm down. This wasn’t meant for mature, been there, done that, students like me. It was for those promiscuous youngsters, the libertines who spend their semesters prowling through the halls of learning, firing bodily fluids at one another as they go, all hungry eyes and suggestive gestures.
Because they’re all mad these days, those youngsters, with their tindering, grinding and snapchattering. And not just mad, sex-mad. It’s the porn you see, it has them driven bananas, they don’t know what to do with themselves, where to put it, how long to leave it there, whether to stick, twist or shout. They’re tormented, the poor mites.
If left to their own devices they’d all be dead in a month, their enraged loins exploding mid-coitus, engulfing they and their hapless partner(s) in big, sexy flames, burning down half of UL in the process.
Yes, this generation, these milennials, have a lot to answer for, not least the potential downfall of humanity.
I’d just about written my young colleagues off, vowed to give each and every one of them a very wide berth when next we met. And then UL released a statement to the press.
Fourteen cases. Fourteen.
The University of Limerick is home to approximately 15,000 students, fourteen of whom have been diagnosed with either Gonorrhoea or Chlamydia.
That’s not an outbreak, that’s a miracle.
I’ve been in pubs with more STIs than that, hell, I’ve been in houses with more.
Far from being a feckless group of ingrates, rutting one another to death on a daily basis, the young students of UL are, in actual fact, quite sensible. They are mature, responsible adults with a healthy attitude to sex and all it entails. They are everything that previous generations in this country weren’t.
So why the hysteria then? Why the oh-so-alarming email? Having spoken to UL, it has said that the offending missive was marked in such a way as to ensure that all students read it. Well, mission accomplished. Not only did all the students read it, so did all the media, both local and national.
As a result, the fine young scholars of UL have been denounced as compulsive fornicators, incapable of sitting through a lecture without humping the leg off the person sat beside them, like a cheery Jack Russell in heat.
Most people don’t look at the figures, they don’t bother with the facts. They just the see the headline. They see the headline and make a snap judgement: Students + STIs = all students have STIs.
And, given the low regard in which the students of UL are held in by local residents, this suits the narrative perfectly. Now not only are they rampaging through the city’s streets like modern-day Vikings, they’re spreading disease too.
Besmirching the character of an entire study body is one thing, but spreading fear and panic unnecessarily is quite another. And the irony is that much of that fear and panic will be experienced by people who don’t even attend the University of Limerick.
Yes, there will have been a few shame-faced souls shuffling into the Student Health Centre over the past week, gritting their teeth, regretting their whimsy, as they’re poked and prodded in a very unsatisfactory manner.
But much of the panic will stem from elsewhere; from the parents, from the health professionals, from the Government, and, dare I say it, from the Church. They’ll be the ones sermonising, warning of the dangers of unprotected sex, doing their level best to drag us back to the dark ages.
And is that really want we want? To have another generation grow up like we did? Believing that sex is bad and God is silently judging you every time you slip a hand down your undershorts? No. We’re in a much better place now, we might not be sexually enlightened, but we’re certainly sexually educated.
And nowhere is this more apparent than in our younger demographic, in those who’ve been taught about sex from a young age. They know exactly what they’re doing. They know the risks, they know the dangers and, despite what some people might think, they’ve got it all under control. All they need now is for someone to trust them.
Going for a cure
I had a hangover once that lasted for three days. It was so bad that my motor functions deserted me; I couldn’t speak, could barely hear, breathing was a struggle. I genuinely thought I’d given myself brain damage.
But, like all hangovers, it eventually went away. I got well enough to head back out to the pub and give myself another hangover, and all was well with the world again.
They’re a nuisance though, hangovers, especially at this time of year. All that lovely food, those tasty treats, ruined by a stomach struggling to cope with a self-inflicted nuclear disaster. If only there was a way to drink to excess and not pay for it the following day.
Well, your prayers have been answered. This Christmas, for as little as €199, you can attach your booze-riddled body to an intravenous drip and magically be cured of all your ailments.
Bearing the appropriate moniker, REVIV, the service in question is offered by Dundrum clinic, Venus Medical. It promises to reduce your hangover recovery-time and get you back to work (the pub) as quickly as possible.
How it does this is anyone’s guess, but they mention Infusion and Booster Shots so there’s probably cocaine or something in it. In fairness, at that price you’d really want to be getting something more than just a hangover cure. Especially when a few hours on the couch and a tube of Pringles could do the exact same job.
