Medicated, Zoned Out, and... Working!

I'm all of the above. In fact, I'm blogging to keep from keeling over on top of my keyboard. I'm in Sechelt for a couple of days, working on our big monthly report. Drove in this morning in a last-minute CAN co-op car, which I had to fetch all the way from near Hastings and Nanaimo in the middle of the night, because it's the only car that was available for two days. Thanking the powers-that-be for 24-hour pharmacies, I stopped by Shoppers Drug Mart on the way home to see if I could something extra potent for this cough that seems to be worsening.

2:00am
Me [coughing up a lung in aisle 8], holding up a bottle of Benylin: "Is this the strongest stuff ya got?"
Pharmacist: "I've got something stronger... but it's got codeine in it."
Me, quite ignorant about medication in general, as am accustomed to having a tough immunity system: "What happens with codeine?"
Pharmacist: "It can make you drowsy and constipated."
Me, trying to weigh up the benefits of a decent night's sleep versus constipation:"How drowsy are we talking about?"
Pharmacist:"Depends on the person."
Me, quite unconvinced about my ability to beat drowsiness or constipation, holding up the Benylin bottle:"Is this my next strongest option...??"

The pharmacist nodded, so I bought that instead. I had visions of myself falling asleep at the wheel and driving off the road on the way to the ferry this morning, the ambulance report listing me as "patient in stable condition, very constipated."

*VOMIT SPOILER*

It was no exaggeration what I said earlier about having a great immunity system. I've never had a headache. I got the flu maybe once every three years, and went for over a year at a time without so much as a sniffle, let alone a full-blown cold. In the last couple of years, since I've been attending uni, I've fallen prey to every virus that enters my airspace. Last November I had such a bad case of the flu I bought my first bottle of aspirin ever.

For the past week and a half I've been unable to shake what seems to be a chest cold. I should've just gone to the doctor and obtained antibiotics, but on Sunday I thought it was pretty much over. Then a couple of days later, I started coughing so hard I thought I'd give myself an aneurysm. It was brutal. I finished off a bottle of herbal cough syrup I got in Ireland last spring (the last time I was coughing this much), two boxes of Ricola cough drops, two packets of other cough drops, and even -- *gag* -- a bottle and a half of Buckleys. (A true Canadian poison.) This morning, when I was driving the onramp to the ferry, I coughed so hard I threw up on myself... errrrr, lovely.... Thankfully, I hadn't eaten breakfast. Then the same thing happened in the parking lot after I got to the office.

Finally, Melanie could stand it no longer, and sent me off to the clinic here in Sechelt. She told the nurse it was an emergency so I could get in, so when I got there, the nurse looked at me skeptically, especially when she saw my Vancouver address. "Emergency?"-- she said dubiously. I nodded, saying I couldn't even eat anything. I'd been coughing so much that by the time the doctor showed up in his office, I'm sure he'd already written the prescription for me in his head.

"The lady in my office fears I have whooping cough," I said to the doc. He shook his head, saying whooping cough has a very specific sound, and I just had a viral infection. Great. Just. I told him about the pharmacist offering me codeine, and he said, "This stuff doesn't have codeine, but it's codeine-related."

Codeine-related?

Anyway, I took the prescription and took off to have it filled, desperate to get rid of this death-cough. When I picked it up, I was a bit shocked at the cost:

$37.82 for a 100ml bottle.
Hmmm... I thought, this stuff better be strong.

Holy smokes! When I got back to the office, I took a swig, and within minutes my speech began to feel laboured. The pharmacist had told me to cut the dosage in half and take it twice as often, because she said I'd find it strong. I felt so bizarre, like I'd gone drinking the night before and was completely dehydrated and still a bit drunk.