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.
When I was growing up there was a cough medicine called Pertussin.
It kept half of our high school stoned even the girl that injected Vodka into her oranges her mom put in her lunch.
Pertussin worked.
Harsh to the enablers maybe but I agree wholeheartedly. 😀
@ George: Pertussin may have contained codeine. You used to be able to buy codeine cough medicine over the counter, as I recall. Seems to me they took it off the market in the 1970s.
Pertussin was, Far Out!
Funny-about-money turns Republican (or maybe libertarian?), I never thought I’d see the day!
@ M Doats: LOL! Around here, we’re calling it “Rabid.” 😀
Believe it or not, though, I used to be a Goldwater Girl. Traipsed around Southern California gussied up in a white plastic “straw” hat with a big Republican banner draped over my budding little breast.
Have to credit Richard Nixon for opening my eyes. Was lost, but now am saved!
Funny, I have never loved you more. 😉
My mother used to tell me when she was a kid and had a cold or stomachache they would make tea with opium poppy pods by boiling them in water and drink it. She said it did wonders. I used to think they just got high and didn’t know the difference, but now I’m thinking maybe it did work.
Don’t hold back, Funny. Tell us what you really think! LOL!!
One idiot wanting to chugalug cough syrup and Mountain Dew isn’t hurting anyone, except said idiot.
These stupid laws do more to hassle hacking coughing citizens than inconvenience creative drug abusers. Here in Oklahoma, it’s Sudafed and Neosynephrine that you have to sign your life away to get some.
I agree 101! I think the drug war in general is a waste of money and these ridiculous regulations make it harder for the people that use needed drugs responsibly. I just don’t think the government should be in the business of telling people what they can and cannot do as long as they’re not harming others. Last week we had to sign papers and answer questions just to get Sudafed. I can’t believe Sudafed is “behind the counter”.
It’s the Nanny state.
Our government is going to protect us from everything, so they think.
The issue is that they do not live in the same world that we do.
The federal government has crossed the fence and gone where it is not allowed by the Constitution.
Holder should be fired.
Exactly. Actually most Republicans AND Democrats should be fired and replaced. Too many big government politicians that think they know what’s best for everyone.
I was a Republican until I realized both parties are practically the same when it comes to how they run and grow the government. The differences are basic distractions to keep us from seeing what’s going on behind the curtain.
Our choices for President in November are a joke. Only one of them is truly constitutional and consistent but he’s been black balled by the media and the Republican insiders.
That would be Ron Paul.
All the candidates that are running as R’s are less than desirable there are no winners in there but I would never cast a vote for Obama.
I was a Ron Paul delegate in the 2008 war and when we got to Carson City (Nevada) and the RNC realized Ron Paul had the delegates they suspended the convention.
The RNC will pick the winner and we are getting so very close to another revoloution.
On the other paw or hoof our southern border is wide open to the mexican drug lords.
There is a reason that we don’t have the border fenced.
Votes for the democrats.
They don’t care who votes for them as long as they get a vote.
We have a plethora of illegals in southern Nevada. When I worked at The Desert Inn (now impolded) I had to learn spanish to deal with the people in house keeping. 99% of them couldn’t speak a word of english
Yeah and their only complaint is that he doesn’t want to police the world and spend billions of dollars to doing so. I used to support the Republican foreign policy but you could say that I did so without really thinking about what I really thought. As the Iraq war dragged on and we started nation building I decided that Republican foreign policy was crap.
I will not cast a vote for Romney or Gingrich. I’m done voting for the lesser of two evils and Obama has been a complete disaster. I’m either writing in Ron Paul or voting third party.
@ All commenting on the cough medicine rant: Wow! That post seems to have come near a bull’s-eye!
Agreed, esp. with 101 Centavos and Brad Chaffee, that the degree of hassle inflicted on law-abiding citizens is not worth whatever interdiction Nanny rules put on birdbrains and dope fiends.
The problem seems to be that as a Body Politick we failed to notice Prohibition didn’t work! It didn’t stop people from drinking (although it apparently did lower the overall rate of alcoholism, at least temporarily), but it did stimulate and fund a thriving industry in organized crime. Same thing appears to be happening today. A great deal of drug-related crime would go away if drugs were decriminalized.
On the other hand, it has to be said that using drugs is no more a solitary, harmless activity than is abusing alcohol or killing yourself with nicotine.
Often children are involved. The kids are innocent victims; if we’re to say that we will not pay for a user’s medical care or for the consequences of driving or shooting drunk or stoned, are we to withhold Medicaid for the moron’s children? Should children be removed from the home permanently if a parent is found to be doing dope? Then what? We can’t find adoptive homes for the waifs who are in state custody now. If we start removing even more kids, how much will it cost to build state-run orphanages in which to warehouse them?
Here in lovely uptown Arizona, drug use is considered (hang on to your hats, ladeez and gents…) a “lifestyle choice.” CPS is not allowed to remove children from a home because of a parent’s “lifestyle choice,” and therefore they will leave children with people who are known drug users. Makes sense, huh?
Then we have the meth issue. This easy-to-concoct, highly poisonous and wildly addictive drug is the reason we all get to undergo the third degree every time we get a stuffy nose. Don’t know about you, but now that it’s become a major hassle to get a box of Sudafed, I stockpile the damn stuff. Three or four months after a purchase, I’ll buy another package of it, whether I need it or not. That way I can be sure to have a decongestant on hand the next time the local monsoons fill the air with head-blocking dust.
Meth is the poster child of drugs that harm everyone around the user. Morons who cook it up in the kitchen contaminate the house’s entire structure with toxic chemicals (a meth house really can’t be fully decontaminated and ideally should be razed to the slab). The mix is explosive and will not only blow away the amateur chemist but injure and kill any children in the house.
Just the other day a house here “mysteriously” exploded (the neighborhood had no gas service…); flying debris landed on the neighbor’s home and both houses burned to the ground. Those instant meth labs people play with in their cars get thrown out at the first sign of detection; anyone who picks up a pop bottle off the ground risks having it explode like a grenade in his hands.
If we made a truly nasty drug like meth legal, probably we’d have fewer morons cooking it up in tract homes. On the other hand, this stuff does some weird things to people’s minds — do we really want half the morons in our society (a large proportion, evidently) flying on meth?
True, the “war on drugs” is a pathetic fiasco. But legalizing all contraband drugs across the board presents some problems.
On the other hand, one could compare meth with wood alcohol. We have managed to legalize drinkable forms of booze and still dissuade all but the stupidest and the most desperate among us to refrain from tippling wood alcohol. Possibly if other forms of dope were legal, dope fools would make better choices among them.
Speaking of fiascos, one thing I think we can all agree on is that the political leadership of this country all across the board leaves a great deal to be desired. To my mind, it doesn’t really matter one way or the other: neither party is showing itself to be much better than the other.
We need to get big money out of elected representatives’ pockets, and we need to get the corrupt and the moronic out of office. How exactly we’re to accomplish either of those escapes me.
Great points funny and very well stated.
I certainly agree with you on the meth too. That drug destroys more than individuals because of how it affects the one doing it. My point would be that keeping it illegal doesn’t really stop people from getting their hands on it and if they do have a hard time the desperation causes them to be more creative in how they get high by using things that are just as harmful but still legal like by huffing paint. (look no further than this article for evidence of that. LOL)
I do admit though that it could cause those that would have never tried it because it was illegal to possibly try it but I tend to think like Dr. Paul in that I don’t believe most people would start using it because of the change in legality.
It’s definitely a tough issue to figure out because I do believe the side that wants to save people from themselves has good intentions but sometimes it’s best to let people figure things out for themselves without someone telling them they can’t. I think it can be said that there is plenty of evidence that suggests that when someone is told they can’t do something it can be the very reason they end up trying it.
Oh and Washington is a lost cause it seems. Like you said, too many special interests and corrupt politicians to even know where to begin. It’s the main reason I like Ron Paul so much. Like him or hate him he’s been saying the same stuff for 30 years regardless of what his peers think and believe. They can’t allow him to be seen as credible because if they do people might realize he has been warning Americans about what we’re going through now for years.
Great conversation and I know you never expected it to spark such lively discussion. haha! This was my first time visiting your blog and I love the way you write. 😀
Didn’t mean to imply there were any huffing paint references in this post. LOL I was speaking to the reason you wrote the post in the first place which is because morons have experimented with the very medicine you needed to get well probably because they couldn’t get there hands on something else. 😀
@ Brad: Argh! Bring that soap-box back over here!
Okay, I suppose the spray paint is locked up behind bars to discourage graffiti artists. That’s another circumstance we could do without. But…should we care if someone burns out his lungs sniffing spray-can propellant?
Or possibly the gene pool would improve in such a specimen’s absence?
Haha! I think most people have the common sense to avoid sniffing paint and if they don’t then they should be ready for the consequences. And yes, the Gene pool would possibly improve. 🙂
I’ve done my share of experimenting myself back in my younger days but it was the consequences of the drug-use itself not the legality that kept me from losing control.
I think the problems aren’t necessarily the drugs themselves as much as they are the result of something gone terribly wrong in the lives of those that eventually lose control. That is a hornets nest of possibilities to unravel though. LOL
What’s to come? The government will eventually outlaw free will. Haha!
LOL! Brad, I think they’re already trying the best they can to do that. 😀
I hate that I have to go to the pharmacy counter to buy Sudafed. Come one, this middle aged woman is not trying to make drugs!
Punish the majority because of the few.
@ Kay Lynn: Mwa ha hah! Those middle-aged women are the worst types!!!