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Most evenings, Suk-Ja does her homework, eats her dinner, does more homework if there's more of it, then either goes out with friends or sits in her dorm room with a book until it's time for bed. Today she gets interrupted midway through her boxed dining-hall sandwich by a wave of horrible nausea.
She stops eating and waits for it to go away; it gets worse. She stands up with the intention of going and lying in bed for a bit, and ends up sprinting for the trashcan and throwing up what feels like everything she's eaten today.
The one good thing about vomiting is that once you're done the nausea goes away, except this time it doesn't go away even once she's spitting out nothing but bile.
Her roommate Min Jee is understandably somewhat concerned. "I think my sandwich was an evil sandwich," Suk-Ja grunts between dry heaves. "So maybe not contagious? But maybe go somewhere else tonight." That's all the encouragement Min Jee needs to grab her essentials, toss Suk-Ja a couple of spare trash bags, and go visit her boyfriend for the night.
Suk-Ja staggers to the bathroom, still clutching the trash can (a smart choice, as it turns out) and takes up station beside the toilet to wait out the food poisoning/norovirus/whatever the fuck. It does not want to be waited out. She tries to sip water from the bathroom sink; it comes right back up every time.
She doesn't know if she sleeps that night, curled up on the bathroom floor, or just zones out intermittently between vomiting episodes. Min Jee texts in the morning to ask if she's doing better, but her phone is on her desk and her desk might as well be on the moon. By mid-afternoon she's lost the ability to force herself up onto her knees next to the toilet, but there's so little fluid left in her to come up that it doesn't matter.
When Min Jee gets back after classes she takes one look at Suk-Ja and says "We're going to the campus medical center." Suk-Ja tries to cooperate with this, but she can't make her legs stay under her, and she's not that heavy but Min Jee isn't strong enough to carry her across campus. They end up taking a taxi to the hospital.
