My mucus membranes are currently providing room, board and reproductive services gratis to a stupendous badass of a rhinovirus. The cold is following the usual, mundane arc. I’m at the stage where only one nostril is plugged at a time, and the inflammation currently in the process of moving “downtown” to my “lungs” where it will take up residence for a week or two. As a result, a rather tencious variety of mucous, something the approximate viscosity of liquid caulk, is being produced in my pharynx and collecting around my epiglottis, which makes interesting reedy, flutey, bubbly noises at the beginning and end of my every inhalation and exhalation. No amount of coughing will clear things up, so I’ve just tried to resign myself to tolerate it, and limit my fits of ineffective hacking to once every half hour or so.
On the plus side, I am once again ambulatory and no longer confined to the living room couch by fatigue and the biological imperative to watch copious amounts of Animal Planet and weepy Jane Austen movies. This means getting caught up with work, so I am motivated to try to get a good night’s sleep. Having the woodwind section of the Boston Philharmonic testing out the acoustics of my trachea is somewhat contradictory to that goal.
So I rummaged through the cabinet and found some cold medicine. Says so right there on the box in bold black text. “Cold Medicine.” (We are a fan of the generic OTC drugs in the Fries household.) “Non-drowsy relief!” it also says.
The Gentle Reader, no doubt, has already recognized my error. Clearly, what is required in this situation is drowsy relief. Soporific relief. Unconscious relief. Eight-hour coma relief. Boot-to-the-head, gooooood-night-everybody, see-ya-in-the-morning relief.
But when did this occur to Podkayne? As she was swallowing two tablets of non-drowsy relief. Oh, well, I thought, I’m pretty damn tired, so I’ll have no trouble falling asleep.
And I was right.
Then I woke up.
At first, it was a warm, happy place where I woke up. I was in the grips of some odd dream/hallucination that I was knitting a sock around myself, and but had drifted off to sleep while turning the heel and had completely lost track of how many stitches I had on the top, how many I’d picked up from the heel flap, and it was developing into a rather disconcerting mess. I finally woke up enough to realize that I wasn’t knitting, and I could just lie there and relax.
And besides, it’s not like I could move my arms anyway.
I was feeling warm and tingly and pleasantly sleepy, and was content to lie that way for a while before it actually sank in that I could not move my arms.
This lead to a little stir of panic. With a not insignificant force of will I managed to feelby flail my arms a little, but once I let them lie still, they sank again grew warm and extremely, extremely heavy. I tried my legs. Same deal.
I tried to decide if this was cause for concern.
Suddenly it occurred to me that my throat was awfully phlegmy. With mounting concern I began to wonder, was it possible for a cough suppressant to supress your cough enough that you’d choke to death on your own mucous? I started wiggling limbs more aggressively as I pondered this, which seemed to drive off the feeling of paralysis. I tried not to panic. After all, my airway, at present, was largely unobstructed. It felt gooey and unpleasant and was making rather a lot of whistles and hoots at the beginnings and ends of breaths, but plenty of air was making it in and out. (I had a case of bronchitis last year which has become my gold standard of “Oh my god, oh my god, I can’t get enough air, I’m gonna die,” and this was nothing even approaching that.)
Now in somewhat compentent command of my extremities, I decided to try an experiment, and lay facedown on my pillow to try to suffocate myself.
(Yes, it was the middle of the night, and I was high as a kite on cold medicine. Why do you ask?)
Reassuringly, my body made increasingly urgent demands for air, and I decided that I could probably go to sleep without worrying about dying. Except that, having been vigorously exercising my limbs, I’d completely driven off my happy warm paralysis buzz and having half-suffocated myself, and I was left wide awake, listening to my thudding heart as rhythmic accompaniment to Gheorghe Zamfir, master of the mystical pan flute, who is doing arcapeggios on my epiglottis.
So I did the only thing you really can do at 2 AM when you’re loopy on cold medicine and unable to sleep. I booted up my laptop, answered some email from students, and logged into the registrar’s website where I could wreak untold amounts of damage with an unwary keystroke.
We’ll have to see if there’s any fallout from that.
It’s now 4, and the cold medicine has worn out. So I’m wide awake, unparalyzed, and my right nostril has restuffed itself. And I have learned my lesson. Heed my words, friends: Nyquil. NYQUIL.
That is all.