I am currently enjoying the most anticipated gift of each new school year. Oh sure, I appreciate the little handmade crafts that arrive battered and broken in the children's backpacks during this first week, but the real pinata of pleasure is an invisible (yet still thrilling) collection contained therein.
I refer, obviously, to the the first virus/bacteria/fungus/parasite/whoknowswhat that we all welcome into our homes every August. Despite the best efforts of the teachers and their antibiotic pencil sharpeners, if we viewed any school surface under a high-powered microscope, it would resemble a tiny and disgusting zoo. Not as putrid as a regular zoo, of course, but still frightening enough to trigger some real panic.
After falling victim to one of these wretched bugs, I did what any expert physician would do. I staggered to my friendly neighborhood pharmacy, to purchase just enough pseudoephedrine to allow me to breathe without drowning in my own nasal secretions. After standing/leaning/drooling at the pharmacy counter just long enough to make a total fool of myself, I was finally informed that I could not legally purchase any of this medicine because I had "reached my limit." Um, is this a bar? Of course, it is not. At a bar, a person walks in looking and behaving like a rational human being, and employees only refuse to serve her once she begins acting like a maniacal baboon. At a pharmacy, I crawl in looking insane and babbling incoherently, and only appear sober if they serve me.
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| No Pills for You, Psycho! |
Naturally, I was very annoyed. I bear no ill will toward the pharmacists, as I realize they have to follow the law. They are monitored by surveillance cameras, and more menacing, by teenage managers who will fire them if they misbehave, once they (the 15-year-old managers) are done copying their homework from their Homeroom cheating buddies. Of course I am kidding. Nobody has any reason to bother cheating at Homeroom. It's not even a real class. But these are real laws, and for good reason. We all know pseudoephedrine can be made into illegal drugs, but any pharmacist could look at me and discern that I am not nearly intelligent enough to figure out how to do so. I never even passed chemistry.
The problem with this particular law is that someone suffering from a bad chest cold looks identical to someone on illegal drugs. I had my hair in pigtails, and had just bought Cookie Monster pajamas from this same store. If you had just witnessed a 34-year-old woman, with sunken eyes, gray ponytails and a bleeding nose, wandering around your store buying Sesame Street jammies, and worse, actually REFERRING to them as "jammies," you would be suspicious too.
As I have been denied good, old-fashioned, lab-created medication, my only choice is now to buy some of the hard stuff from a foreign online pharmacy. That's right, folks. I have been sneaking some Vitamin C and Zinc from an anonymous source, and I have to admit... after a good dose of these two, a long nap, and a Spongebob marathon, I am feeling pretty great. They do not even cause me to stay awake for days at a time and yell at inanimate objects. Unfortunately, I am now so addicted to Spongebob that I may require rehab, and the pharmacy employees will probably refuse to sell me any more of the DVD's. Curse Netflix for removing it from from their lineup. It looks like I'm back to online black markets.
WebMD may help you more than even I can, if you catch my cold through the internet.
