M. Allison Arwady '98 rarely gets sick. Actually, up until the fall of her sophomore year, the last illness Arwady remembers is her sixth-grade bout with pneumonia.

"I knew something was definitely wrong when I started to feel sick," Arwady says. "The symptoms were familiar with the pneumonia I remembered having, but the doctor I saw at UHS sent me home with a decongestant."

Three days later, Arwady, too weak to walk, returned to UHS in a police car.

Arwady was inspected by another doctor, who diagnosed her with pneumonia and sent her to Stillman Infirmary, where Arwady spent the next week.

"With a week in the infirmary and the time I spent recovering, I ended up falling behind in a lot of classes," Arwady says. "I wish they had diagnosed me earlier."

On the surface, Arwady's experience seems like the stuff students' complaints about University Health Services (UHS) are made of.

But Arwady, who is a Crimson editor, goes beyond the usual gripes about the health services and quickly points out that she doesn't blame UHS for the misdiagnosis.

"I don't know enough about medicine to know if the doctors could have actually detected it any earlier since both doctors said the pneumonia was hard to hear," she says. "Once I was admitted to the infirmary, the care was wonderful."

Other students' experiences seem to agree with Arwady's.

Emily R. Sadigh '99 says that most of the problems she has had with UHS involve access to doctors.

"Just last weekend, I called and wanted an appointment with a doctor, dentist and optometrist," Sadigh said. "The earliest they could offer me, besides spring break, was in April. I ended up getting an earlier appointment by seeing a nurse practitioner."

Sadigh says that this isn't the first problem she has had with UHS. Last fall, she called UHS describing flulike symptoms, only to be told "not to worry."

"It ended up getting a lot worse, and a week later when I did see a doctor, he diagnosed it as bronchitis," Sadigh said.

Like Arwady, Sadigh has no complaints about the care she finally received.

"Everything worked out after that, and that has usually been the case at UHS," Sadigh said. "You just need to get in to see the doctor."