Life, or something like it.

 

Nasal decongestants are a dime a dozen. The things are everywhere and they will advertise themselves as being able to do just about everything...including unclogging the kitchen sink. What they don't tell you is what an idiot you can make of yourself in public while using decongestants.

For example, there are the kind with labels that read, "for nighttime use only". These are the pills that self-destruct after daylight. It is advisable that you keep them in your medicine chest and only open it after the sun goes down. These "vampires" of the drug set are designed to relax you to the point of entering a light coma. Operating a moving vehicle while under the influence of one of these is not a good idea.

If you come up behind a car that is sitting at the red light for the fourteenth time, it is an easy bet that the person behind that wheel is zonked into la-la land by a dose of antihistamine sleeping dope. Car horns and screaming do not affect people in this condition. Simply pull your car into oncoming traffic and move around them. Hopefully the oncoming traffic will understand. If not, you can always claim it was the other driver's fault, you know, the one with the really big eyes and hair that stands straight up on end? He will use a few finger gestures and shout a few obscenities but then he will get over it... eventually.

Then there is the other kind of decongestant, that you are not allowed to use before retiring for the evening. This stuff is lethal if used anywhere near a pillow. You take a dose of this stuff and your eyelids will pop as big as cookies the second your head comes to rest. Then you spend the rest of the night wide awake, listening to your heart running the Indy 500 and hoping you'll win the race. Counting sheep will not work in this situation, and it is for this reason that online chatrooms are always open 24/7. The people who run them are insomniacs, hopped up on decongestants.

Of course it is always wise to read labels when dealing with the mystery drugs that are put forth on the market these days. There is always that one ingredient which is apparently added to the mix for the sole purpose of making you sicker than you already are. You have a couple of options here.

You can either be drowning in your own phlegm and unable to catch your breath, or you can breathe easily but not in your bathroom because you have non-stop diarrhea, a side effect of the pills. Or you can sleep well at night without suffocating under a stuffy nose, but you have the added bonus of perhaps not awakening in the morning. Your choice. Oh, and don't forget to take another totally different kind of pill when you do remember to wake up in the morning. You don't want to be the guy sleeping behind the wheel at the intersection, now do you?

Trial and error is the only way to truly determine the correct dosage of the correct decongestant for you. How else will you know if the darn thing will float your head from your shoulders, or put you into a coma? Also this is a good way of determining how you will react when the pill finally wears off, four, six, eight or twelve hours later. It is a lot of fun finding out the hard way that the twelve hour caplet you took twelve hours ago has just quit working and your body is now prepared to retaliate. It has been saving its favorite miseries up for the past twelve hours and will now eagerly dump them all on your head at once.

You are sitting down (if you are lucky) and your head suddenly begins to swim like a goldfish in a bowl, a small bowl at that, and the fishy is swimming in circles. You try to stand up, and thud, someone pops two big corks in your nostrils, disabling your nose-breathing apparatus for the duration. You are now a dizzy mouth-breather.

Try not to be out in public when this happens because if you are, you will soon achieve a brand new reputation, and quite possibly a new knick-name to go with it. Goober comes to mind. You will be staggering around like the town drunk, and walking into really big walls that most people somehow manage to avoid. Don't even think of trying to cross the street. That car that is flying through the intersection with a sleeping driver at the wheel, (yes, sometimes the car is not in the stop position when the dope takes effect) has your name written all over it. You will cough, choke, retch, gag, develop a gonging headache, sneeze every second for the next fourteen years, and will not be able to walk a straight line when the nice officer asks you to.

For your personal safety it is advisable in the case of emergency allergy relief, to simply call your mother on the phone, and ask her what it was that she used to feed you when you were a little kid. Whatever it was, it always worked exactly the way it was supposed to, no matter what, because moms always know. Always. Do not be surprised when you ask her, if she informs you that it was a jelly bean that always did the trick for your childhood ailments. You were from a different planet when you were a child.