The Cough Drop Of My Dreams

In the 1950s, every child in America had their tonsils taken out, until I came along, and evidently I was Dr. Martin's inspiration to try leaving them in to see what happened. Dr. Martin was our family doctor. He made house calls with his black bag and called my mom "Mother." Sometimes he'd just poke his head into my bedroom and take a good sniff and then write out a prescription. What the heck, Dr. Martin is said to have opined, those tonsils must be in there for a reason. Family lore holds that Dr. Martin said mine were "as big as hamburgers" in their normal summer state. In the winter they were often a raging mess of fire and pus-pockets. Everything infectious that came down the pike landed in my tonsils, and yet no one offered to remove them for me.

I wasn't even that bothered by sore throats because I was so used to that particular kind of pain. Once, as an adult, I went in to the doctor with some sort of strepto-crud, and he sent me off with antibiotics and offered to prescribe something for the pain. I was incredulous. Pills for sore throat pain? Ridiculous. I told Dave about it when I got home, without the prescription, and he about jumped out of his chair. "You never, ever, ever refuse painkillers," he drilled into me. Just as I was known for blown-up tonsils, he was famous for having his teeth blow up deep into a Friday night on a holiday weekend.

What I did hate was the awful cough that came in after the throat started to heal up. The kind of cough you could split your head open trying to suppress, and then once you gave in it was all over, and you coughed yourself into the dry heaves. And there was one thing and one thing only that could give you a fighting chance, and that was Parke-Davis Medicated Throat Discs. Major licorice flavor, which I hated, but oh boy did they work. They were a miracle. I've tried to find them since. I Googled them. Guess what? Someone is selling them on Etsy. Not the discs, precisely, but a "Vintage Box [EMPTY]" for $12.99."

I began to suspect they are truly unavailable.

And on the box is a hint why. They contain "not more than one-half minim of chloroform."

The Food and Drug Administration evidently drew the line on that in the '70s. A minim is one-sixtieth of a fluid dram, or about three-fathomsth of a cubit. In case you were wondering.

Well, shit. Somewhere around the same time it was determined that the pharmaceutical and advertising sectors were insufficiently profitable and so then we got TV advertisements for drugs to replace the cigarette ads. Up until then doctors were presumed to be the experts on what pills we should take but now we get to help them out by asking if such and such is right for us. "How about the Pill That Starts With F?" we say, helpfully, and our grateful physicians slap their foreheads and say "Boy howdy! I'd forgotten all about that one," and off we go with our pills, and off the advertisers go with our money. And this is why we now know exactly what we're in for, with warnings about everything from death to anal seepage, and whatever's in between.

So I'm not sure why we don't get to have the good stuff anymore. The cocaine in Coca-Cola, the chloroform in throat lozenges. How bad could they be?

Also, who saves forty-year-old cough drop boxes? That degree of speculation eludes me. But not my friend Walter. I remember he saw me with a metal Chapstick container in 1973 and said "Save that! They're making them out of plastic now." I've still got it somewhere, I think.

I wonder what Walter's got in his drawers. As one does.

Don't Try This At Home

Two weeks ago Dave brought home a cough, not that we needed one. It was pretty annoying. To him, probably, too. Mine came in a few days later and before long we sounded like the TB ward. Nothing dry about the cough, either. It was long and juicy, chest-deep, and tailed off like cans rattling behind the Trans-Am at your cousin's wedding.

That was entertaining for a few days and then we peeled off into specialties. I got head congestion resembling concrete for a day or two and then it subsided into something blowable. So that was an improvement. I developed an odd, rippling, lackadaisical, old-lady flatulence that (since I was eating nothing) I put down to my gut bacteria working over the gallons of phlegm I was swallowing. And then, a week in, and rather abruptly, and after noticing that I was on the floor for some reason, I realized I needed to get into a more comfortable position from which I was unlikely to fall further. I threw kibble at the cat without even making her roll over for it and got into bed.

I don't know what my temperature was. The next morning, which arrived against all odds, I felt pretty decent and took my temperature, and it was above 101. So I'm pegging the previous night at 109. I got up a few times in the night and ricocheted all the way to the bathroom on spherical feet. I had it together just enough to assemble a wastebasket in front of the toilet but I couldn't work out the essential problem: if I was going to throw up and I was going to faint, didn't it matter which order I did those in? I was pretty sure it mattered.

Somehow I got back to bed using a path that would be represented in The Family Circus by hyphens, and continued enjoying my fever. I  was engaged in the endless arrangement and re-arrangement of blocks of type from the Gutenberg era, and the lighting wasn't good. Chinkity chinkity chunk. Chinkity chinkity chinkity chunk. Periodically red lights would appear. They would invariably turn out to be eyeshine from the left eyeball of someone quite recognizable. Rasputin. Katie Couric.

The upside of the delirium was I didn't have to hear Dave cough. Since he had never worked up much in the way of a fever--a brief flirtation with 99--he had decided to double down on the coughing. Now he spent every night and much of the day working out phlegm, chunks of lung tissue, vermin, items of furniture, and the like, culminating in a little sob. He'd pared his sleeping time down to nothing. I was sleeping twenty hours a day. Whereas before we had been able to take turns doing each other the occasional small favor--a plate of sliced apples here, a poached egg there, a refill on the vaporizer--now we peered at each other with quelling hostility lest the other deign to ask for something.

My coughing could not compete with Dave's in degree of difficulty or style points, but it was still plenty persistent. By the third day of my 102+ fevers, I began to feel my ribs snap, one by one. One of them poked all the way through the skin, but it was in the back so it didn't show. A friend came by, flang rescue groceries onto the porch, and peeled away from the curb with a honk.

I'm pretty sure Googling the symptoms of Ebola is one of the symptoms of Ebola.

That night I abandoned the type rearrangement project and instead examined busy little white strands of DNA, masses of them, motoring away on the world's ceiling six inches above my head like processionary caterpillars. Later I couldn't remember if I was making boulders or little haystacks, so made little progress. I woke up with my face sealed shut. My eyes were breaded and I spent the morning chiseling away at a new cement installation around my nostrils.

And I discovered that the entire inside of my face now tasted and smelled like nothing I had ever encountered before. But it wasn't anything you'd associate with a person who's still alive. I went to our doctor. She confirmed I had the flu.

"I don't get the flu," I explained patiently. "I've never gotten the flu."

Did you get the flu shot?

"I did get the flu shot."

Oh, that's right. This year's flu shot didn't target this year's flu.

But I had a deal. The deal was, I get strep throat and everyone else gets the flu. I'm the strep queen. I might have had it thirty times. You feel like shit for two days, you go to the doctor, you get a bunch of pills, you start to feel better. I was happy to take the strep throat burden off my fellow citizens. Proud, even. But this--this is bullshit. This is the stupidest idea ever. There is no point to it.

I'm home now enjoying my recovery, with a few new features. My ears finally got off the train and said they'd check back with me in a few stations. Every time I lie down I hear doughboys marching endlessly in the snow in the trenches where they used to be. I feel like shit. But now it's shit I can see over. A few days from now, I hope, I'll be able to cremate the bed linens and start anew.