It's December and we're well into cold and flu season. Fortunately, I've stayed relatively healthy (knock on wood), if you exclude that two-week-long ""ulcers from J202 stress"" stint.
But as the weather grows colder and our noses rosier (go Badgers!), the more we start sniffling, sneezing, coughing and aching. Every time I walk into a school building after a 20-minute hike in the frozen tundra, I'm drenched in a cold sweat and my nose is dripping snot down to my ankles—and that's just because of the weather. But god forbid you actually catch something. Missing one week of school means all of a sudden you have three 20-page papers due by Monday and a failing attendance grade. It's unacceptable.
The good news is there's a cure for your winter wellness woes, and it comes in the form of purple drank. It's NyQuil, that ""sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, fever, best sleep you ever got with a cold"" medicine that you can buy at any CVS or Walgreens. But be careful, because experience showed me that it should be used with caution.
Last week, I started to develop a nasty cough. My voice had transformed into a chesty, Phyllis Diller-like squawk. Naturally, I opted for the NyQuil in the medicine cabinet, because when something is compromising the four hours of sleep I get each night, it tends to skew my bitch-factor into Janice Dickinson territory.
The problem with NyQuil is I never know exactly how much is an agreeable amount, one whose potency won't have me dreaming of puppet musicals featuring David Cross as an inebriated ventriloquist. And all the smarty-pants who would suggest I just read the label can leave snide comments on someone else's column, because everyone knows you can take more than the recommended dosage and be totally fine... Or so I thought.
One night during my sick-week, I was in a sleep-deprived, irrational state, which made my decision to take double doses in the name of sleep before bed almost instantaneous. So, not a moment after my head hit the pillow, I was down for the count.
I woke up to my alarm that had been blaring for half an hour at 8 a.m. and rolled out of a bed to discover I had inadvertently become drunk. Although I have little recollection of the event, it seems only logical that I mistook the NyQuil bottle for my water bottle that had been sitting on my nightstand and chugged 10 ounces of cough syrup instead.
Since I was stumbling as I walked to the kitchen and could barely focus my eyes on the microwave clock, it seemed like a no-brainer to skip my morning class and sleep my Nyquil hangover away. Unbeknownst to my cloudy and muddled mind, I had given hardly any thought at all to skipping class the day of an exam, the same one I had been up 'til dawn studying for the night before.
I woke up again hours later, feeling nauseous, not only from the hybrid-hangover I was experiencing, but also from the overwhelming anxiety that besieged me all at once as I realized the terrible mistake I had made.
That's how I discovered that NyQuil should actually be the ""drooling, farting, amnesia-inducing, cherry flavored, makes-you-drunk"" medicine. Sometimes we have to learn the hard way. I sure did.
Lesson learned—recommended doses are recommended for a reason. I do admit, though, that the NyQuil did make me feel as healthy as Richard Simmons on a Stairmaster. Had I countered my drowsiness with DayQuil that morning instead, I probably would have been kicking up my heels and ""Sweatin' to the Oldies,"" rather than failing Spanish.
While NyQuil helped my health, and unintentionally made me drunk, I don't think I'll be tripping on cough syrup at the next kegger I attend. Walking around with purple drank in my red Solo cup isn't really my style. Besides, if I were going to consume a liquid that would make me as intoxicated as NyQuil, it would definitely be of the lucrative, yet classy, illegal variety. As luck would have it, there's a beverage that that's both illegal AND tastes just like NyQuil. It's called Four Loko.
