wherein Liz continues to suffer through her cold

[edenfalling]

I thought I had stashed two doses of NyQuil in my tote bag on Wednesday night, but apparently I only formed the intention and then forgot to actually carry through. So when I got to work today and it was time for my next dose, there was nothing in my bag.

*headdesk*

Fortunately one of the local Collegetown convenience stores had some NyQuil in stock, so I bought a four-dose box (which is a complete ripoff in terms of price, btw) and have gamely suffered through the day. I even successfully rented a studio!

I have permission from Mom Boss to close early, however, and I am going to take her up on that because I just want to fall into bed and sleep for thirteen hours in a row.

UGH.

(Look, I would love to use cold medicines other than NyQuil, but that's the only one that actually does diddly-squat to mitigate my symptoms. Other than old-formula Dimetapp, that is, but IIRC the FDA first diluted that to the point of ridiculousness and then banned it altogether. I am sure there were valid safety concerns involved, but mostly I'm sad because goddamn that weird purple syrup was effective.)

Comments

[alexseanchai]

...is THAT what happened with Dimetapp

[edenfalling]

Well, more accurately with a certain component of Dimetapp, as detailed in this NY Times article from 2000. After a period of waffling (during which the dilution happened), all products containing phenylpropanolamine were pulled from the market. Dimetapp then tried pseudoephedrine as a replacement, but I think that can be used to make meth so they switched again to phenylephrine. Since phenypropanolamine was the chemical that ACTUALLY WORKED FOR ME, all later formulations are basically useless for my purposes.

Dimetapp still does exist though, and apparently they have a cough suppressant version that works on whooping cough. Who knew!

[krait]

They changed Dimetapp?!

Okay, I mean, nobody wants to have a stroke, but man - that stuff was a staple of my childhood because it was the only medicine that tasted good. As a kid, being sick was like Medicine Russian Roulette: not really understanding how medicines worked or being able to match up medicines to conditions, once you admitted you were sick there was this short tense wait before you found out what you'd get: the purple medicine that tasted awesome, the pink medicine that tasted kind of okay (less so as I got older), or the horrible red medicine that tasted like miserable sticky regret.

[edenfalling]

Yeah, first they tried to be "well, if we dilute the formula it's much less likely that people will hit dangerous levels of phenylpropanolamine by accident!" and then they gave in and just retooled the active ingredients altogether. Which meant it stopped working for me and I stopped buying it. *sigh* But it was definitely a bright spot in the childhood medicine roulette, particularly compared to Robitussin or Delsym. (Cough medicines. Pure cough suppressants always seem to be particularly vile for some reason.)

Triaminic was also relatively palatable as medicines went. It was sort of orange-candy flavored, and I believe also aimed at colds and coughs. But I think its original formula also used phenylpropanolamine so who knows what became of it after 2000.

[krait]

On the plus side, the new formula probably tastes the same? So I could just buy it and drink it. ;D

We never had the orange stuff, alas! But the awful red stuff was Robitussin (or its generic form). The pink stuff was Amoxicillin (or its generic form); I remember liking it as a small child, but as I got older the taste became less and less appealing.