Expired Drugs Still Work

After three weeks on the new job, I had to call in sick yesterday. Not to worry, it was legit. I’m not surprised I caught a nasty head cold. All that exposure to new germs, my hands on strange doorknobs and bathroom stall doors, breathing in foreign air and the commingling of my familiar family of dust mites with theirs. It was just a matter of time before my body reacted.

I drifted in and out of sleep on the couch, the clear, cool beauty of the day wasted on me. Earlier, I woke up with my S.O. and promptly told him I felt sick. I had the feeling he thought I was faking it but my pounding head, scratchy throat and post-nasal drip made me the wiser.

The prospect of calling in sick for the first time made me a bit nervous. There was a procedure for calling in sick. Section 1, Subsection 3 of our beast of an Operations Manual detailed such proper procedure. Our department maintained and actually followed, a manual that each employee was issued upon their first day of work. It’s kept in a large, 5-in. ring binder and it detailed everything from what exactly to say on your outgoing voice mail message to how to negotiate contracts, from indemnification to force majeure. I would imagine, for the layman, a monster document like this would invoke fear and scorn. But for me and my control-freak sisters, it’s a thing of beauty; a guide for order, balance and uniformity in the small, chaotic universe, we often are forced to navigate.

But yesterday morning, I couldn’t remember exactly what Section 1, Subsection 3 described as the proper procedure for calling in sick. So I decided to play the new employee trump card and just left a voice mail for my manager. I wondered to myself how many times I could get away with playing that card.

Every time she visited, my college roommate, C, now a pharmacist, made it a point to rifle through my medicine cabinet and toss expired meds and anything else she didn’t deem fit to swallow. I silently thanked God she hadn’t visited in a while because Hallelujah! There, between the expired Claritin and the expired Cloraseptic, was some expired Walgreen’s cold medicine. Given the choice between taking old antihistamines and breathing like an asthmatic smoker, I took the former.

I started to see stars, the kind you see when you shut your eyes tight, then opened them again. I succumbed to the lovely, lightedheadedness from the meds and took my place on the couch. I felt…globby. The prospect of going back to work and tackling the Operations Manual and all that it represented—the meticulousness, the extreme attention to detail required to be successful—made me think of trying to stuff a globby, oozy mass into a clear, plastic cube, clearly too small for its contents. I knew in my gut that in order to earn the respect at work I secretly craved, I would have to step up, increase my game, and goddamnit, make my oozy, globby self fit in that plastic cube. But for now, I just enjoyed my foggy haze, rolled over to avoid couch sores and decided it’d be best to worry about it tomorrow.