{"id":334,"date":"2010-02-16T22:59:42","date_gmt":"2010-02-16T22:59:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2010\/02\/16\/on_hot_lemon_action\/"},"modified":"2015-10-13T13:21:17","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T13:21:17","slug":"on_hot_lemon_action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2010\/02\/16\/on_hot_lemon_action\/","title":{"rendered":"On hot lemon action"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>or what to do if a Dutch Canadian offers you a packet of white powder<\/em><\/p>\n<p>\nI went home early on Friday. I was running a temperature, sneezing unreservedly  and feeling more than a little under the weather. The boss took one look at me and said &#8216;Go!&#8217;. On Saturday I felt a little better, although I faded a bit in the evening. Sunday was fine, just a bit stuffy and feeling slightly sorry for myself. Nonetheless, we walked to the pub and back and then I cooked (and enjoyed) a lovely dinner.<\/p>\n<p>\nJust before bed I decided to try some Canadian cold remedy that Eva gave me, after she heard about my difficulties in obtaining <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.lablit.com\/2010\/01\/controlled-trial\/\">stuff that works<\/a>. I checked the ingredients, and thought they looked pretty innocuous:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Acetaminophen 650 mg<\/li>\n<li>Chlorpheniramine Maleate 4 mg<\/li>\n<li>Pseudoephedrine hydrochloride 60 mg<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Dextromethorphan hydrobromide 20 mg<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\nI checked the &#8216;Precautions&#8217;. Blah blah, stenosing peptic ulcer, pyloroduodenal obstruction blah blah blah, pregnant women, blah, <em>May cause drowsiness, excitability, nervousness, restlessness, sleeplessness, dizziness and palpitations<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>\nWell, I thought to myself, acetaminophen is paracetamol, and that&#8217;s 0.6 of a regular dose. Chlorpheniramine maleate is <em>Piriton<\/em>, my favourite antihistamine that doesn&#8217;t make me drowsy (stonking blood-brain barrier, obviously). Pseudoephedrine, standard dose, and I don&#8217;t suffer from its side effects. I&#8217;ve taken analgesics and pseudoephedrine together for years, and the antihistamine shouldn&#8217;t be a problem, so I&#8217;ll be fine. That just leaves the dextromethorphan, which according to Google is a cough suppressant.<\/p>\n<p>\nNow, I don&#8217;t actually see the point of cough suppressants. They don&#8217;t cure you of anything; they simply stop you coughing. Which means that you don&#8217;t get rid of the stuff making you cough, which makes you sick for longer, although you and\/or anyone sharing the bed with you might get to sleep better. Now I didn&#8217;t have a cough, and it&#8217;s an impressive list of side-effects, sure; but hey, I figured, I have a robust metabolism. What harm can it do? Besides, 20 mg isn&#8217;t that much.<\/p>\n<p>How wrong could I be? It says on the packet, &#8216;Hot Lemon Relief&#8217; and in small caps FOR SYMPTOMS OF COUGH, COLD AND FLU. On the reverse it says something similar in French. <\/p>\n<p>\nAnd all I have to say, in French, is <strong>Boisson chaude au citron<\/strong> <em>mon cul<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>\nI went almost straight to sleep, but woke about three in the morning. We&#8217;d watched <em>Silent Witness<\/em> on the iPlayer and all I could do was keep going over the plot in my mind (and remembering the brain slices on the slab). I remember thinking &#8220;I&#8217;m feeling nervous&#8221;. I made a cup of tea and laid on the sofa. I may have shook a little. I finally crawled back to bed about 5.30, to be woken by my alarm two hours later. I hid under the pillow and announced I wasn&#8217;t going to work. <\/p>\n<p>\nI called my boss.<\/p>\n<p>\n&#8216;You sound sick,&#8217; she said.<\/p>\n<p>\n&#8216;Thank you,&#8217; said I.<\/p>\n<p>\nAbout 11 I decided I&#8217;d steadied myself sufficiently to have some coffee. Two sips in and my pulse rate was stratospheric. I went back to bed and hallucinated a bit more. I thought about dying, but decided it would raise too many questions. The feeling of lucid delirium was a very strange one: around three in the afternoon I decided to take a shower, and the bizarre thing is that I found myself clicking through songs on the iPod, even as I stepped into the shower. I knew this was stupid <em>but I couldn&#8217;t stop<\/em>. Fortunately the iPod survived, and I got dressed and ate half a bar of chocolate.<\/p>\n<p>\nBy evening I was in a state approaching something resembling normality. I was even able to collate all the entries to the <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/search?q=%23sci140\">#sci140 competition<\/a> and choose a <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.f1000.com\/2010\/02\/16\/on-a-new-publishing-model-the-winner\/\">winner<\/a>. Today has been better: I went to work; had stuffed sinuses and felt a little light-headed at times, but there was nothing a walk in the fresh air didn&#8217;t fix. I even took some Sudafed, with no side-effects. <\/p>\n<p>\nCanadian cold medicine? You can keep it. Eva reckons I&#8217;m wired up wrong. I say they&#8217;re trying to kill us.<\/p>\n<p>\nKids. Just say &#8216;No&#8217;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>or what to do if a Dutch Canadian offers you a packet of white powder I went home early on Friday. I was running a temperature, sneezing unreservedly and feeling more than a little under the weather. The boss took &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2010\/02\/16\/on_hot_lemon_action\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}