I have been a very sick kid the last week and a half now. It started with me just feeling a little under the weather, and then I had a work event full of insanity lasting two nights long. I barely ate and spent the night running around in the cold in a cocktail dress. Then, I spent the next four days in bed. I am clearly not in my twenties any longer. That is what I told Brian as I groaned in agony on the pile of laundry next to the bed because I didn’t have enough strength to get in again after going to the bathroom.
I have a thing about doctors. I refuse to go unless I’m certain that I’m outright dying and about to leave Brian with a sad legacy of horrific sink dishes and student loan debt. I explain this so that when I say I went to the doctor, you know how bad I was feeling. I needn’t have bothered. They basically called me a drama queen and sent me home with a medication called “Tessalon Pearls” to help with the coughing.
“You work, so I’ll have to prescribe you something that doesn’t make you drowsy,” said the doctor.
“Thank you,” I said.
I picked up the bottle from the pharmacist and it said “Warning: may cause drowsiness. Do not drive or operate heavy machinery until you know how this medication will affect you.” Oh the irony. Luckily, it doesn’t make me drowsy. The doctor knew what he was doing after all.
I took the bottle home. They look like really tiny oil capsules.
“They prescribed me something called ‘Tessalon Pearls,’” I told Brian.
“So basically you’re telling me that your lungs are non-stick now?”
“Yes,” I said.
“No, see I was being funny,” Brian explained. “Your line is: ‘it’s Tessalon, not Teflon.’”
“But yours is so much better,” I said. “Let’s pretend my lungs are non-stick. Either that or we can call them ‘Tessaract Pearls.’”
“What is a Tesseract?”
“It’s from A Wrinkle In Time. In fact, a Tesseract is a wrinkle in time, a jump. This means that I was just proscribed time travel pills. Let’s go with that. MUCH better than non-stick.”
“Uh… sure,” said Brian.
So basically, this post is to say that if you need me, I’ll be fighting dinosaurs on a spaceship far in the future. You know, until the pills run out.
Casey E. Hamilton 