By Friday afternoon, I was so sick! And coughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. The voice was gone—for three or four days it was all I could do to whisper, not because of laryngitis (as in a cold settling into your throat) but because the unstoppable violent cough was tearing up the windpipe. I called a Safeway pharmacist and asked if he could recommend a cough medicine that would work.
“Only one cough medication will work,” said he, “and you’ll have to get a prescription: codeine. Dextromethorphan does nothing—it’s practically useless.”
Roger that, pal! “I’m kind of afraid to ask my doctor for codeine,” I said. “He’ll think I’m drug-seeking.”
“Well, you’ll have to get over that,” he said.
So I called the Mayo and repeated to the gatekeeper lady what the guy had said. When I said “…and the pharmacist said I should ask for a codeine cough medicine,” she took on a real snippy tone and said “uh-HUH!” She didn’t hang up on me but said a nurse would call back. Which of course never happened.
Gasping for air and no longer able to speak above a whisper, I finally e-mailed my son and asked him if he would ask his P.A. friend to write me a scrip for a cough med that worked. Finally, around 6 or 7 p.m., this elicited the desired pharmaceutical. My son went up to the Safeway to retrieve it, where he found that Medicare and Medigap absolutely positively will not cover it. Fortunately, it only cost $20. Wouldn’t have mattered…I’d have paid a hundred bucks for it.
And it worked, just like it worked when I was a teenaged girl and used to get these nasty coughs. And no, it did not poison me and it did not make me high. It did, however, allow me to get to sleep for a few hours.
By Saturday morning the cough was still gawdawful but at least was more or less controllable. Sunday it was still terrible, but less so: the throat started to heal up and the torso hurt less with each heave. It took a half-hour to quiet last night’s regular evening frenzy, but I slept until 4, when after a brief coughing frenzy another dose put me back to sleep. This morning the cough-fest was not so bad that I needed any medication, and by about 9 a.m., lo! it pretty much started to settle down.
Now, this very evening, I can talk! Actual words, in an actual voice! Not a single coughing frenzy all day long, and no doses of codeine since 4:00 a.m. Along about 3:00 p.m. my appetite started to come back. It even occurred to me that I wouldn’t mind a bourbon and water—haven’t even been able to look at my favorite potables for the past ten days.
Obviously, I’m holding off on the boozie-poo, just in case another frenzy strikes this evening or during the night. But if this state of affairs stays stable through tomorrow…gosh, maybe I could have a glass of wine with dinner tomorrow night!
🙂
In the course of double-checking whether it would be safe to take codeine for bronchitis, I found out why Big Brother is so anxious to keep this useful and highly effective antitussive out of our gummy little hands.
The Moron Brigade has decided that drinking cough medicine is THE way to get stoned! Sunovabiche.
Google “codeine cough medicine,” and up come all these sites where groups of morons advise each other on how to get high on the stuff. Idiots like to mix it with Sprite—the resulting tasty elixir is cutely called “purple drank.” This stuff has been popularized by moron rappers and moron athletes, making the only medication that actually works on a severe cough a very hot item on the moron market.
I found not one but two message boards where stupes were trading dosages and recipes. One of the nitwits actually posted the Rx number of her prescription on the freaking Internet!!!
Where’s yore sign, honey?
IMHO, trying to interdict this stuff, or any of the various intoxicants numbskulls and nitwits like to play with, is the wrong approach.
Instead, street drugs and prescription pharmaceuticals should be made freely available, just like alcohol and nicotine.
And, in the same moment the chains go off, legislation should be enacted to take the chains off ERs, insurance companies, Medicaid, and Medicare. To wit: if you make yourself sick or injure yourself by getting stoked up on a harmful drug, then you pay for your own medical care. If you can’t pay, hospitals will be allowed—nay, required—to turn you away. Your health insurer not only does not have to but will be legally enjoined from covering medical bills that result directly from a patient’s drug abuse. Ditto Medicaid: it will not be allowed to cover medical bills arising from drug or alcohol abuse. If you cause a car wreck and harm someone else or damage someone else’s property, your victims’ insurer will cover their bills, but by law you will be required to reimburse that insurer.
You say you’re a turnip? That’s OK. By law, your wages, your welfare payments, your alimony, your child support payments, your Social Security benefits will be garnished until such time as you cough up all the money…which probably will be for the rest of your miserable lifetime.
And if you can’t cover your own care, if you don’t have a credit card or a checking account or a friend or relative who’ll lend you tens of thousands of dollars to fork over to a hospital or the victims of your negligence, will the taxpayer take pity on you? Hell, no. If you can’t pay, you can go to meet your maker, removing one fleck of blight from the face of this planet.
Harsh?
Well, yeah.
But doesn’t it seem just the slightest bit harsh to you that normal human beings can’t get a bottle of the only cough nostrum that actually works because a few nitwits decide to spike their soft drinks with it? Doesn’t it seem just a bit harsh that all of us are underwriting the medical bills and the prison-cell rental for hare-brains who get in cars and pick up weapons while they’re spaced out on dope?
We’re too damn kind to these fools. We need to let them suffer the consequences of their behavior, and make them pay the bills for it.
