It Sucks To Be Sick

There is a very fine suite of medication I employ to feel healthy when illness hits me (more on this later), but sometimes, the offending malady is too strong and downright evil to be stopped by any amount of drugs. In this case it's a nasty head cold.

I thought I was going to escape major damage this time around. The drugs were keeping the worst of the symptoms in check. But then, last night hanging out with Cathy celebrating her charity 5k fun run with her co-workers, the shit hit the fan. I felt like total crap.

This sucked on many levels. For one, I was suddenly doing my best zombie impersonation. Secondly, what was a celebration time for Cathy now had one less than festive participant. Lastly, Cathy works with a really good group of people that I rarely see, so not being all there for the get-together was a bummer. Sorry guys.

Fast forward to last night as I was trying to sleep and coughing incessantly. I kept waiting for the pillow to cover my head so Cathy could put me out of my misery and get some sleep. At one point she asked in a groggy half-awake state, "Why are you so mad at me!" as if my coughing was an act of antagonism. When I did get to sleep, I started to dream about being sick. Also, probably because of how deeply I've been thinking through a coding project at work, I will admit with embarrassment that I dreamed that there was a bug in my breathing code, and until I fixed it I would continue to cough. I guess androids do dream of electric sheep.

Fast forward further to this morning and one of my least favorite things: waking up after a long night of cold mucous plugging up my head and lungs. The ritual is then a fresh does of drugs and the waiting game. Am I feeling well enough to go to work?

A few words about sick days. I never took a sick day until my mid-twenties. This had a lot to do with my mother, who is tough as nails and has the New England work ethic. She never took a sick day (as opposed to my dad, who didn't mind taking the odd year off of work). Part of the reason for this is simple: when you're making hourly wages (minimum wage, I might add), you don't get paid if you don't show up. There's no allotment of sick days like us salary boys get. Beyond that though, my mom just didn't need sick days. This is, after all, the woman who has been known to pull her own teeth to save dentist fees.

Because of this, I feel like a big wimp when I take a sick day. But what I've learned over the years is that I can't code when I'm sick. There's just too much mental processing, too many balls in the air at once, and all it takes is one cough or sneeze and you've lost it. Then you're spending several minutes picking them up and getting going again.

Also, when you cough all day, your co-workers want to lynch you. And if they get sick from you, they really want lynch you.

So when I decide to pull the plug on going to work and admit defeat to my head cold, I'm left with deciding how to best get through the day. Sleep would be good, but I just can stand the feeling of filling up with mucous. I also can't really focus long enough to do anything fun like read a book or watch a movie.

So I'm writing a blog entry. I think this must say a lot about how I write. That it's really mostly a stream of consciousness that requires very little active thinking. (This is kind of true, I just sit down and write in order, then read back once for typos.) And that I can lose focus repeatedly (like the 2 minutes I just spent feeling sorry for myself for being sick) and just jump back in where I left off . That's the beauty of writing: your words don't have to compile.

So I'm either going to resign myself to trying to sleep and all the grossness that will entail, or I may just wing out a couple more of these babies.

As promised, a word on drugs. When I have a cold, I use two things: an antihistamine called loratadine (aka Claritin) and the world's greatest decongestant, pseudoephedrine (the main ingredient in some, and formerly all, versions of Sudafed). For brevity's sake, I'll refer to pseudoephedrine as PE going forward. (As pointed out by my blogger buddy MommyDoc, Sudafed now has a non PE version that they've dubbed Sudafed PE, so just be aware that my use of the term PE is different than that of Sudafed's.)

PE is amazing, but it's now hard to get and many drug companies have stopped using it in their medication, replacing it with another drug that doesn't work as well (for me at least) and makes me drowsy (PE is actually an upper). The reason for this? PE is now strongly controlled because it is one of the ingredients needed to make meth. This means you can only buy one box at a time, and only at a prescription counter where you have to show id. My hunch is this will lead to the end of PE being used by drug companies eventually.

Now, I'm all for not allowing people to buy a dozen boxes of the stuff, but can't I at least buy one or two without going through a long process? If some drug dealer wants to run in and out of CVS stores buying two boxes at a time, I just don't care. I'm for educating people on the dangers of drugs, but you can't legislate common sense (or morality). And nothing is as sweet as forbidden fruit.

Oh God, that must be the cold medicine talking, since I hate political rants. Oh well, now you know how I feel about the "war on drugs." And that I hate being made to feel like a criminal because I want to buy medication that improves my quality of life and that I have no intention of abusing. And that I'm pissed that the difficulty of acquiring PE will most likely mean that it will eventually not even be available as a cold medicine.

Blame the pseudoephedrine. Perhaps we need to ban this dangerous drug all together. (Please don't, I'm only kidding. I need my PE!)