It's the little differences that throw us the hardest.
I recently emigrated from the United States to Canada. (And if I hear one more person ask "Why did you move from the US to Canada?" in the same tone as they might ask "Why did you slam your hand in the car door on purpose?" I will be Very Angry.) For everyone in the United States, Canada’s great. You really should come up for a visit some time, though if you live in the south or the west, I’d confine my visits to the summer months. The people of Canada do not live in igloos, there is not snow on the ground year-round in Toronto, and you get from place to place using your feet, a bicycle, or a car - not sled dogs. Unless you go to Quebec, you don’t have to speak any language other than English. The money looks different and there are no dollar bills, but it’s spendable for food and lodgings and other things. In cities on the US/Canadian border, most businesses will even accept American cash (you’ll just get your change back in Canadian money.) Cars drive on the right side of the road (that’s "right", not "correct"...but for North America, it’s the same thing.) US citizens don’t even need to get a visa go travel to Canada. If you were in a US city one day and magically woke up the next day in a Canadian city, you wouldn’t notice the difference right away. The differences are all in the details.
The maple leaf, not the stars and stripes, flies from the tops of buildings. The sodas use sugar, not corn syrup. (They never went through the "new formula Coca-cola" garbage up here, they stayed with the good stuff!) Sausage is spiced differently - it’s not as piquant. The drugs are different. Not the illegal ones...they’re probably the same just about everywhere. I’m talking about the legal ones that are in every drug store and supermarket. The stuff that everyone depends on to get them through colds and flu. Out of all the things that could have given me problems — this one was by far the oddest.
When I was living in the US and had a bad cold, I would get non-drowsiness formula cold medications. I would take a single regular dosage of the medications in the evening, and never mind what the package said, they would put my lights out. Non-drowsiness forumula Sinutab and Benadryl were companions I could count on. I was guaranteed a good night’s sleep uninterrupted by coughing, waking up achy, or any of that garbage. Best of all, this was all without alcohol (which is in most cough syrups.) I would wake up the next day feeling, well, not necessarily better, but I did wake up the next day - not several times during the night. This did mean that I had to suffer through the days, but I’d make the best of it, knowing that my non-drowsiness forumla buddies were waiting to speed me on my way to six, seven, maybe even nine hours of blissful, uninterrupted, healing slumber.
My first Canadian winter was no problem. I crossed the border in October, and had a decent single-person pharmacopia for winter chills, coughs, hacks, fevers, and flu. My second Canadian winter I was out of medications, and made a trip to my local store and bought a package of non-drowsiness formula Sinutab. I got home, waited until after dinner, took the Sinutab and got ready for bed. Damn if the non-drowsiness formula didn’t do what the packaging said: it didn’t put me to sleep!!! I stayed awake most of the night aching and wheezing and feeling yucky; and couldn’t sleep during the day. This was a disaster of catastrophic proportions.
After a few days, the cold began its migration from my head to my chest, and I started coughing. Previously I would have gotten enough sleep that this stage was REAL short - a day or so, at the most. This time, though, it hung on and on and on… I headed back to the store to get some cough syrup (those lozenges never do me a bit of good.) Looked through all the usual suspects, Nyquil (just slap a "percent-proof" on that stuff), Vicks 44D, and others of their ilk. I spotted Buckley’s Cough Mixture on the shelves. I’d been seeing ads for this stuff since I crossed the border. The price (about half of what the others cost) combined with the lack of alcohol in the stuff decided me, and I took a bottle home.
Buckley’s Cough Mixture is apparently uniquely Canadian. Their ads feature an old man walking out on a stage to stand in front of a microphone. He speaks the ad-stuff, and slowly turns to head off the stage to applause from the audience, and then the commercial cuts to a picture of a bottle of the cough mixture against a plain white background. Buckley’s slogan is "It tastes terrible, and it works." Knowing this, I was prepared for just about anything. I read the directions like a good little self-medicator, opened the bottle, and poured a tablespoon of this thickish, oozy, milky-white stuff. My thoughts were a little off the beam:
They want me to swallow this...and they’re not taking me out to dinner first?
I screwed up my courage and swallowed, and for ten of the longest seconds of my life my throat felt like it was being clawed by small animals with lethal pedicures. The main ingredients in Buckley’s are menthol and camphor. They have a soothing effect, but more importantly, there’s a slight numbing effect too. Unfortunately, the numbing effect takes longer to kick in. Well, they were right about the taste - but geez, they want us to swallow, they want us to pay for the privilege of doing so, and they don’t even have the courtesy to add pineapple juice? NOW I know why the guy in the Buckley’s commercial always has that hidden smug look on his face. I also know why he walks like he does. He’s not old, he’s 23!! He’s just prematurely aged from filling all of those little bottles. He can’t even walk completely upright any more.
I now have friends in the US pledged to send me American-style over-the-counter medications in care packages, containing Aleve (basically non-prescription strength naproxen sodium), Neosporin (can’t figure out why this isn’t available up here), and good old American nondrowsiness formula cold medications that actually are "mega-drowsiness formula" for me.
Now if only I could find a way to get McDonalds’ sausage pucks…
Keywords: | pharmaceuticals | illness |
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