You said: "It doesn't really matter to me, I'm trying to figure out a way not to go at all this year. I'm hoping to catch a summer-long flu bug or something. Pray for me!"
I recommend cat scratch fever if you can manage to find a cat that will infect you. I guarantee you at least three months of flu symptoms and swollen lymph nodes, exhaustion, antibiotic therapy, and bedrest. In my case it lasted a lot longer than three months due to misdiagnosis; if you find a small-town GP you might get to do antibiotic roulette for months and get a lymph node biopsied for Hodgkin's before a specialist figures out what's really happening and prescribes the right drug to kill the bug. You could miss the summer ass-emblies and maybe even the next circuit ass-emby too.
By the time I was genuinely on the mend, I was pretty much forgotten by the congo, and was able to do an easy fade into real life.
The down side of this one is that you will have to forgo the pleasure of living with cats for the rest of your life.
Maybe it would be easier to fib and SAY you have some disease; it's not really lying, consider it Theocratic War Strategy...