Okay, let me tell you about Paidhi Boy. He’s four years old. He’s a picky eater, very particular about flavors. So particular, in fact, that for years I’ve suffered through the hell that is trying to give medicine to a child who’s very particular about flavors. I’ve had every kind of medicine spit on me, I’ve spent half an hour per dose coaxing Sudafed drop by drop down his throat. Every attempt to give him Robitussin has messy results in a kind of “ah, so that’s projectile vomiting!” way. The only medicine that was tolerated–requested in times of health, even!–was berry flavored ibuprofen.
Imagine my delight when the doctor told me about Flavorx. Some sainted soul, some ultimately compassionate bodhisattva, had invented flavoring that could cover up any medicine imagineable. “Even Robitussin!” said the doctor. “The pharmacy should have it.”
So I go to the pharmacy. “Do you have Flavorx?” I ask. The pharmacist looked at me as if, instead of asking if they could please make my child’s over the counter medicine palatable, I had asked if she had a decomposing human body in her car trunk.
Right. Time to try another pharmacy. Shop & Save had it, but, they told me, wouldn’t put it in OTC meds. “Why not?” I ask. The dashing pharmacist, brimming with social graces and oh-so-articulate, shrugged.
I told the doctor of my troubles. “See if they’ll do it if I write you a prescription.” Bingo! It worked, although she wrote me a script that just said “strawberry flavor for OTC medicine,” and the pharmacist (not the shrugger, another gem) asked me in a distressed voice, “Is this the medicine they want you to put it in?”
These are OTC medicines. They are sold over the counter because I, as a literate and reasonably intelligent human being, am trusted to dose my children with them myself. But apparently this all changes when that same medicine is strawberry-flavored. Perhaps he feared that I was only buying it for the pseudoephedrine, so I could make myself a very teensy, tiny bit of strawberry-flavored meth. I gave him my waitress smile and told him if he didn’t make the damn Triaminic Chest Congestion strawberry flavored I’d cut off his balls and run them over with my mini-van.
No, I didn’t. I politely told him that yes, the doctor had nothing else in mind but that particular bottle of Triaminic when she’d told me to go ahead and just get the kid’s medicine flavored so he’d take it without puking. He finally put the stuff in, grudgingly enough, as though I’d asked him to put strychnine in my kid’s cough syrup, and he was going to do it but he wanted me to know he didn’t approve one bit.
That was a few months ago. And now Paidhi Boy is sick again, and has an ear infection. The doctor wrote him a prescription for an antibiotic, and another for more of that strawberry stuff. You know, it’s addictive, they can’t let just anybody have it. I went back to the same pharmacy, figuring they’d done it before so it would be easier to convince them this time. Except they didn’t have the Triaminic I wanted (and that I had asked the doc to specify on the script). So I go to the desk with a bottle of Robitussin and a bottle of kids’ pseudoephedrine. I explain my problem, and point out that the Triaminic has, as its active ingredients, guaifeneisin and pseudoephedrine, and I’d be happy to buy two doses of Flavorx and would that work?
“Oh, no,” says the drooling assclown behind the counter. “See, these medicines already have flavoring.”
“Right,” I say, my vision of a happily medicated child evaporating before my very eyes, “see, that’s the whole point of Flavorx–it’s flavoring for medicines that already have flavor. My doctor told me this, and besides, you did it for me a few months ago.”
“Oh, no,” he says, “we can’t do these.”
“You did the yellow Triaminic before,” I say. “What if I turn in the antibiotic script and go to another store and buy a bottle and bring it back to you?”
“Why don’t you just try another Shop & Save, like the one ten miles down the road?” asks Satan’s mentally challenged stepchild.
Well, since I’d been foolish enough to let the doctor write both prescriptions on the same paper, I was kind of stuck. I drove to four different pharmacies. Either they didn’t have the yellow Triaminic or they didn’t have Flavorx. Paidhi Boy is sick. His ear hurts. He’s not sleeping. When Paidhi Boy doesn’t sleep, I don’t sleep. When I don’t sleep, I get Just. A bit. Testy.
Listen up, bitch. Hand over the fucking strawberry flavoring or I’ll pull your guts out through your mouth and strangle you with them. What the hell is it about strawberry flavoring that makes it a controlled substance anyway?
I took the kids home–I’d had enough. I sent Mr. Cameron to a store that sold yellow Triaminic, and sent him to the first stop with the receipt and the prescription. If I’d gone myself, you’d have been reading about me in the papers by tomorrow morning. I told him that if the damn pharmacist wouldn’t flavor the medicine, tell him I’d be down there with a rusty grapefruit knife and a whole lot of pluck and determination. We will see what results.