Last week I had to message my staircase’s Facebook chat to ask if one of them could bring me water because I couldn’t stand up. And you thought your Friday night escapades were pathetic! This wasn’t a hangover, though, but a nasty four-day stint of freshers’ flu. I’m lucky enough not to have compulsory lectures, so I spent a good deal of last week sleeping, drinking cinnamon tea and reading (or failing to read) Montaigne.

But this is hardly the position everyone finds themselves in when they get sick. If you’re a NatSci, for instance, four days of missed work becomes a seriously difficult hole to fill in. As for me, I don’t know if you’ve ever knocked out an essay on Renaissance humanism in two days, but suffice to say you don’t get much sleep. So, is illness at Cambridge just one of life’s little inconveniences, or is there more that could be done to alleviate its effects?

How badly illness can set you back with work partly depends on your supervisor. Mine, luckily, was supportive, although he did point out that it was important I got something in to stop me falling behind. If yours is less forgiving, that could mean feeling pressured to travel to your faculty or lectures when you’re not in a state to leave college (I got light-headed and almost fell over on the road outside Pembroke on my way back from lectures, which was a pretty scary experience, given that I’m not fond of getting run over) or staying up until 4am to write up a lab report when you need sleep to recover. Both of these, of course, will just lengthen the stay of whatever virus you’ve picked up, or leave you immunocompromised and weak, vulnerable to whatever illness next crops up in college.

The bad side of independent university study is that there’s only so much your friends can do. Even my friends on my course are often covering wildly different material on any given week; God knows my Mathmo neighbour is not going to have much luck helping me through Utopia, just as his differential equations might as well be written in Sanskrit to me.

Taking out books and lending them to your sick friend is lovely in theory, but likely to lead to a surprise £10 overdue fee when you both forget about it until week 6. Lecture notes are promised then mislaid, resources on Moodle can take weeks to be uploaded, and we’re still a few centuries away from the technology allowing someone to read my books for me.

Of course, with your average bug, the nurse can’t do much more than give you paracetamol and tell you to get some rest, but that doesn’t mean changes couldn’t be made to reduce the amount of work we’re missing.

The case for a reading week has been made extensively in the past, and has so far failed to make a dent, but the case for it still stands. The difficulty of getting a higher-than-average workload completely finished in a shorter-than-average time and the unwarranted mental strain this can take on Cambridge students is not something that should be underestimated, particularly for those who are perfectionists, juggling time-consuming extracurricular commitments, or have a history of mental illnesses such as anxiety or depression.

However, even if that’s too extreme a change, I’d suggest a simpler one: monitoring how lectures are scheduled. I’m an English student, and out of my lectures this term, there are approximately double the amount of lectures in the first half than there are in the second. It was the same last term. If the lectures were dispersed more evenly, getting ill in the early weeks would not be such a catastrophe.

Other practices can also be adjusted in the case of illness, such as scanning and emailing work instead of delivering it to a different college, or even being able to simplify an assignment so it is less of a strain to complete and still covers most of the material.

We’re all going to end up curled around a mug of Lemsip at some point this term, but being forced to make ourselves sicker by working too hard is a short-sighted approach that can put us out of commission for weeks.