I Loves Me Some Codeine

So my entire family’s been sick for the last month. We all had the flu around mother’s day, got better, then all got sick again. One of my sons got an ear infection that came on so fast and strong it ruptured his eardrum. Apparently a ruptured eardrum isn’t unheard of and will heal on its own in a couple weeks with no hearing loss, but it’s a little disconcerting to find blood coming out of your child’s ear.

He’s been on amoxicillin and prescription eardrops for a week or so and is doing fine. I’ve been sicker than shit though, with no sign of getting better. Finally I decided I probably had something worse than a cold, and when my temperature broke 103, I figured it was time to see a professional.

So it’s saturday night of memorial day weekend when I decide this, and I know my doctor’s not going to be around until tuesday. I still haven’t learned to get sick during normal business hours. Luckily one of our local hospitals has an after-hours care place, kind of an emergency room for non-emergencies. They have a separate emergency room, so you can go to the after-hours place with something like severe cold symptoms and not worry that you’re wasting time that could be better spent on that guy with the heart attack and the knife wounds and his kid that ate Raid.

The doctor I saw was a very cool black woman with dreadlocks. She checked me out and said that even though she didn’t see any bronchitis or ear or throat infection, it was probably there given the length and severity of my symptoms. So some antibiotics, and prescription antihistimines. Then she asked, “How’s your cough, is it bad?” Of course what I heard was “Would you like some codeine?”

I didn’t have to lie, because my cough really was bad. It was keeping me up at night and my body ached from the repeated convulsions of my coughing fits. So she says not only is she going to give me codeine cough syrup, she’s going to give me a couple refills on the prescription because it’s “good to have around”. Well shit yeah it is.

Now I don’t know if you’ve ever had codeine cough syrup, but this stuff is one of pharmacology’s greatest inventions. I’ve had Tylenol 3’s plenty of times before, and I don’t know if the codeine dose in those is lower or what, but they’re nothing compared to the cough syrup. Not only does the stuff stop me from coughing, but I get to go to bed wrapped up in a fuzzy velvet blanket of opiate peace. Give me some cough syrup with codeine in it and everything’s all right, my troubles melting away into a ball of engulfing, drug-induced warmth.

And this is why I must never try heroin.

But I’m set for codeine for the next few months or so, after which I’ll need to get sick again to maintain my addiction. Oh well, life’s full of little challenges, isn’t it?