Pharmaceutical Roulette

-Sunnydale it is not. The Commonwealth War Graves -

I'm a creature of habit. When illness strikes at home my first move is to the local healthfood oriented store for a couple large bottles of Lemon Ginger Echinacea juice. Then it is off to Walgreens [a place I only enter when ill or in need of mug shots/id photos that exude a major creep factor thanks to the wondrous tint of flourescent lighting and the surly photolab tech behind the camera] for Dayquil, Robitussin, Mucinex, and Claritin - or some magic combination thereof.

Alas, when deprived of my trusty brandnames [or their Walbrand knock-offs] I'm as good as gone. My ineptitude in picking out produce pales in comparison to my misadventures in the duka la dawa

The fact that sickness finally caught up with me shouldn't be all that shocking. Infact, having spent ten weeks working with the wagonjwa, you could say that I was begging for it. In some respects I consider it a parting gift from them, 'an opportunity' to try on their shoes, rather than a side-effect of my vumbi-filled lungs breathing in the dry winter winds.

In seeking a to treat a nagging yet not so diseasey cough, I confidently strolled into the Acacia Pharmacy thinking I'd be able to pick something up quickly, pound it down, and have a very merry final week.

It didn't seem too ludicrous at first, but when the pharmacist brought over an armload of elixirs all packaged and labeled with indecipherable eurobabble I realized I was intuiting myself to my own demise. Even the trusty active ingredients -what I assumed would be my rosetta stone - had been rendered into some bastardized gobbledegook.

Among the few written in semi-English, I found what appeared to be a winning option. Dry Cough? Check. Irritating? And then some. Unproductive? Amen to that.

Like Alice, I took the pill - or in this case a couple swigs of a brownish liquid. Unlike Alice, I wound up not in Wonderland but the morass of mafua mabaya.

Technically I'm not sure if it was the poorly chosen Benylin Dry Cough or fate that did it, but whatever tenuous balance between good and not-so-good health that had existed was obliterated.

As the mound of used floral-scented facial tissues [another unfortunate choice] by my bedside and fullout wheezy-hacky-coughing demonstrate the past few days have been less than sawa. The perk, however, has been my daily trip back to the pharmacy to find to spin the barrel and pray for the magic medicinal bullet.

Now, having more or less rejoined the land of the living and sampled some of the finest pharmaceuticals that a couple bucks can buy, I think I may have found the winning combo:

- COLDRIL [rather than Dayquil] is a winner in my book

- A 'Dry Cough' should not be mistaken for a 'CHESTY COUGH' [huh?]

- Also, when the antioxidant rich Lemon Ginger Echinacea juice is AWOL, a couple shots of KONYAGI fills you with the spirit of the nation.