Life Preservers

Smack!

January 12, 2012 at 5:41 am 1 comment

I am into day 6 of a really nasty cold. Not bad enough that you’re flat on your back, dead to the world, nothing matters, zzzzzzzzzz—but sick so that you feel you must somehow continue to attempt to function as a responsible adult while feeling like absolute crap. Aching muscles, feverish, an impossibility of flem that makes you imagine that research scientists would be amazed if only there were a way to measure the actual volume of it, and moments of exhaustion so extreme that I nearly fell over while waiting in line at the drug store where I had dragged my weary self to buy Kleenex, o.j., soup, cold medicine, and a Lord of the Rings Pez set.

(Yes, a Lord of the Rings Pez set. It was just sitting there on one of those post-holiday 75% off tables. Freakin’ sweet.)

In the past week, I had tried everything in my medicine cupboard:  cough drops, cough medicine, Cepacol throat spray, Alka-Seltzer Plus, Mucinex DM, vitamin C tablets, and echinacae tea.

But I trekked to the drug store once again because, obviously, I just didn’t have the right product. After nearly crying real tears over the overwhelming array of choices before me, I selected TheraFlu. TheraFlu! Yes! It has honey and lemon! The-ra-Flu! It has the right symptoms listed on the box. And, more important, as I stood there in the drug store, stupified with fever and unembarrassed by my childlike whimpering, I recalled a lovely wonderful image from TV of a sick person cupping their hands around a warm mug, with steam rising as they drank in the elixir that brings them back to life. TheraFlu! da-da-da-DA! TheraFlu. Yeah.

So, I get home and read the directions. I am hopeful. I am almost breathing easy. I believe I am near relief. (We never give up hope that there is actually an option other than “feel crappy for 5-7 days.” And the drug companies know this.)

Two points:

1. Dear makers of Theraflu, I’m not sure you grasp the simple idea that a sick person—between fever and chills, mangled sheets, body-wracking-pet-startling coughs, some really quite astoundingly funny but loud enough to wake you nose whistles, and extreme stuffed-up-ness that makes you lie there at 3:00 a.m., absolutely certain you will never-ever-ever feel normal again and at 4:00 a.m., paranoid with the knowledge that being found dead from snot-induced suffocation in an unclean house with teetering dish piles and unrinsed soup cans in the kitchen and 1,002 balled up tissues lying about every other room in the house, wearing stinky gross pajamas, sporting the world’s worst flu hair, and with all that I-swear-it’s-not-boogers dead skin under the nose would be a sad way to die—desperately craves only one thing:  A good night’s sleep.

I bought the night-time version of this product. The directions say “Take every four hours.”

2. The directions say to dissolve the packet of grainy particles in hot tap water (hot tap water!) and include the warning:  “If using a microwave, do not overheat.” (Do not overheat?) There won’t be a little curl of steam? I won’t get to curl up on the couch, hands and heart warmed by my lovely cuppa? Well, hoping (feverishly, irrationally) as I was for a cure, I did as instructed—and nearly had to add puking to my list of symptoms.

That said, I have made it back to work. I’m not proud of how I look, but I am at least no longer wearing the toxic jammies and I have washed my hair, and 80% of the time I feel 57% certain that I will survive this. And when I do, I’m going to find the people who created the TheraFlu TV commercial and kiss each one on the lips. And spit on their keyboards. And lick their phones.

Entry filed under: Humor - Commentary.