I’ve told you all about our trip to Costa Rica, but what I haven’t mentioned was how sick I’ve been ever since. I think I picked something up on the plane on the way down, because during the trip I couldn’t figure out why I felt so tired, and on the plane ride home I realized I had been coming down with something the entire time. I’m sure the constant changes in altitude didn’t help, either.
So I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to beat this thing, and it still hasn’t gone completely. It’s like a respiratory hell, where I can’t breathe and then I spend all night coughing. The first few nights home I coughed so much that Ted, the heaviest sleeper I know, had to go sleep in the other bedroom, and I got a cumulative three hours of sleep a night. I wasn’t getting better because I wasn’t resting, and something drastic had to be done.
Enter NyQuil. The comedian John Pinette aptly calls it “The nighttime, sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, what-the-hell-am-I-doing-on-my-kitchen-floor medicine.” Seriously, who made the stuff legal? One swig from the bottle, and you’re out for seventeen hours.
Ted drove me to get the NyQuil, because at that point neither of us had slept due to my coughing, and his ability to function was going to rely on the Red Syrup of Slumber as much as mine was. We walked down the cough & cold aisle of the drugstore, looking up and down the shelves of over-the-counter drugs, and I realized that I was secretly excited, kind of how you’d feel when you were a kid and you’d been explicitly banned from eating sugary cereals, but then you’d go over to your friend’s house after school, and you would eat three entire bowls of Count Chocula, slurping the chocolatey milk from the bowl in shame.
I tried not to look at the ingredient list; after all, this was NyQuil (granted, we bought the generic version), and I already I knew what I was getting into. But habit and a kind of OCD compulsion drove me to turn the box over, where I noticed that in addition to the active ingredients were the following items: corn syrup, Blue No. 2, Red No. 40 (yeah, THAT Red No. 40), and propylene glycol. Oh, and 10% alcohol, which is what makes NyQuil so damn fun.
Don’t get me wrong, Ted and I try to avoid drugs at all costs. But desperate times call for desperate measures – at least, that’s what I kept telling myself. In the car on the way home I held the bag with the medicine tightly wrapped in the plastic bag, like a dirty secret, and when I got home I opened the box like it was a Christmas present. I waited all night in anticipation, secretly excited for the moment I poured my NyQuil in to the little measuring cup and threw it back like a shot of bad liquor.
Twenty minutes later, I was brushing my teeth with a goofy smile on my face. Ten minutes after that, I was passed out in bed. I honestly don’t kow how I made it that far; if I’d waited any longer to get ready for bed, I’m sure I would have fallen asleep on the living room floor in my clothes.
The next morning I couldn’t get out of bed. I’m a morning person, prone to springing out of bed like a Pop Tart, but that morning I just lay there drifting in and out of sleep. Ted was the first one up, and he made me a giant chowder bowl full of coffee. It sat there next to my side of the bed, and eventually the wafting aroma nudged me out of dreamland. I wandered around all day like a zombie, finally recovering in the evening only to go through it all over again. I wasn’t as excited this time, though I knew that the rest I was getting was worth the feeling like a stoned sloth.
I took the (generic) NyQuil for those two nights only, and now I’m back on a regular sleeping schedule. I’m still a little bit sick, but I won’t take any more NyQuil. At least, not until the next time I get horribly sick and my coughing alienates my husband and disrupts the healing process.
In closing, I’d like to share with you a little poem I found here while Googling “NyQuil” for this post, one that I find altogether appropriate:
ODE TO NYQUIL
O NyQuil!
As red, thou art, as the chilled blood of a cherry bat!
O NyQuil!
You burn with a fire in my throat that could melt the winter sky!
O NyQuil!
You bring upon me a soothing sleep that rests my aching nose!
O Nyquil!
You are far better than DayQuil!
O NyQuil!
Drugs like you that make me sleep are grand!
O NyQuil!
You make me write beautiful poetry!
O NyQuil!
Don’t you think that any respectable ode has an excessive number of “O”s?
-Author Unknown, to me anyway
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