FLORISSANT, Missouri. You can take away his beer and his coffee when he comes down with a head cold, but don’t–under any circumstances–try to separate local plumber Jim Everidge from his NyQuil. “I try to be good when I’m sick because I need to work,” he says after blowing his nose for the fourteenth time since he woke up this morning, “but I really need the good night’s sleep that stuff gives me.”
“All well and good on a personal level,” says Dr. Philip Ormand-Grothstein of St. Louis University’s Center for the Study of Drugs and the Environment. “But I’m concerned that on a societal level we are setting ourselves up for one gigantic cough come March or April that would be so powerful it could uproot trees, alter the course of the Mississippi River, and cause cats’ hair to fall out in clumps.”
New Madrid earthquake of 1811-1812: “Help–our hovel is falling!”
“Cough suppressants” or “antitussives” are drugs marketed to allay coughing symptoms experienced by sufferers of the common cold and similar conditions of the upper respiratory tract. Coughs suppressed by such drugs enter a crepuscular netherworld occupied by lost socks, missing homework assignments and stifled burps, and are released only by major shifts in the earth’s tectonic plates, such as those that produced the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-12, the most powerful earthquakes east of the Rocky Mountains in American history. “The New Madrid (pronounced MA-drid) quakes were so powerful that they caused church bells to ring as far away as Boston,” says historian Mark Dubuque. “Obsesssive-compulsive Protestants who had already attended services turned around upon hearing the bells and returned to church, forcing ministers to come up with a second boring sermon.”
Maybe you could put them in this.
Geologists proposed a “gradual release” of suppressed coughs beginning when the cold and flu season abates in early 2023, but ran afoul of environmental regulations that require a 30-day notice of proposed action, a 45-day comment period, a 75-day environmental impact study period, a 14-day “personal time off” period, and a one-day “free space” comparable to the middle square of a bingo card. For the time being, suppressed coughs will be collected and used to fill the nation’s idle zeppelin fleet, which has lain dormant since 1945 waiting for a dirigible attack that never arrived.
They can have my Nyquil when they pry it from my … sorry, I fell asleep. What were we talking about?