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remember the effects of the very small number drugs Monday, November 28 2022
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
I slept through the night tormented by various fever dreams on the laboratory bean bag. Occasionally the cats outside scratched to get in, but I ignored them.
I decided not to take the day off work, which mostly meant that I stayed in communication with the team and did little else. Instead of going to salvage firewood during the noon hour, I took a bath instead.
I also watched the latest episode of The White Lotus even though Gretchen and I will be watching it again later.
When Gretchen got off work, she went to the Hurley Ridge Hannaford and bought me various things to help me through my illness, particularly Gardein-brand "chicken" rice soup, various fruits and fruit juices, and gelcaps containing only dextromethorphan and guaifenesin. (I would've preferred just dextromethorphan by itself, but that's unobtainium.) There's a tendency among the manufacturers of over-the-counter medications to put multiple active ingredients into their concoctions and then market them as either night-time or day-time products (depending usually on whether they contain diphenhydramine — for night-time — or pseudoephedrine — for day-time —). But this assumes the customer is deeply ignorant and brand-dependent, a person who cannot keep straight in their mind the effects of the very small number drugs that can be purchased without a prescription. I'd much rather have bottles containing pure, un-mixed ingredients and select from among them depending on what I want to happen to me chemically. Even just to get dextromethorphan containing neither pseudoephedrine nor diphenhydramine required that Gretchen opt for a more expensive product branded as being for people with high blood pressure. In a society containing a critical mass of well-educated people, there wouldn't be a requirement for such branding. People would know that if they have high blood pressure, they should avoid pseudoephedrine. And in an ideal world, this would just mean not adding pseudoephedrine pills to the cocktail they take when they're trying to suppress their cough.
After she got home, Gretchen asked if I wanted her to make me her "sick soup," which is what she swears by when she's feeling like how I was feeling. It a rice-noodle soup with chunks of tofu and spinach in a briny garlic-rich broth. I love her sick soup even when I'm not sick, so I said sure, hook me up.
At various times today I measured my temperature, and by the mid-afternoon it has risen to 100.6 degrees Farenheit. I then took some ibuprofen and it fell to about 99.5.
Tonight I slept again on the beanbag in the laboratory, though I let the cats come in and sleep with me because they were surprisingly good about not insisting on climbing all over me. That's something I've trained Oscar not to do when I'm on the beanbag, and he mostly avoids doing so until, I would find out, it's around 6:00am and he's getting desperate for wet food.
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