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why are inhalers prescription items?
Tuesday, March 3 2020
I was feeling good enough this morning to go into to work today. My boss Alex had also been sick, at least for part of yesterday, but he came in today, the first time we'd seen each other since Wednesday. It was important that we see each other because we had a lot of database design details to go over together, something that's been impossible without us sitting together in front of a text editor. It's the closest thing to pair-programming I've ever done. Alex isn't a SQL whiz, but he has a fair amount of SQL experience at this point, and I'm mostly there to help think through the relationships between tables and enforce naming conventions. I hadn't spoken in awhile and when I first tried to articulate a word to someone, I was surprised by how destroyed my voice was. It made me sound a lot sicker than I was, and combined with my lingering cough, gave the impression that I was a real team player for having come into work at all. So after a morning spent haggling over the database SQL, Alex said I could go home. By then it was about 1:00pm.
On the way home, I stopped at the Chipotle on 9W and got a sofritas burrito. It was not as good as I expected it to be, and it was also substantially more than I could eat. Normally I find Chipotle burritos big, but I've never not been able to finish one. This suggested that perhaps my stomach had shrunk over the past several days while I was bedridden and not eating much. That's not surprising.
When I got home, I went to take a poop in the first floor toilet (not bothering to go to the brownhouse). And as I was sitting there, Nancy arrived with Jack to take the dogs for a walk. So I didn't even have to do that.
I'd been a drinking a beer, and soon after climbing into bed I fell asleep. After awaking, I was troubled by a tickle in my lungs that made me want to cough mostly-unproductively. This eventually led to asthma-like symptoms (such as mild wheezing). I've had such symptoms in the past, though not in the last ten years. It made me want to have an inhaler on hand just to quash the unpleasantness. I also found myself wondering: why are inhalers prescription items? Is there really a chance that people will abuse them? And if so, who cares? There are lots of problems with this world, and I know having little control over what medicine one can take is a small one. But I'd honestly rather live in a more libertarian world where people could buy whatever drugs they wanted and take them however they saw fit. Sure, there would be a few problems. But there might be fewer than in the world we're presently in.
This evening I holed up in the master guestroom in the basement to finish the creation of a repository for a Python database importer intended for the Ukrainian outsourcers. When I'd gotten that pretty much done, I surprised the cats by letting them come in and hang out with me. Only Oscar and Diane were around at the time, and I kept a close watch on Oscar to make sure he didn't piss on anything (though it's hard to say which of our cats is a indoor urinator; it's rare to catch them in the act).
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