The Cough Drop Ones. They Do Sooth It's Just Less So I've Been Alternating Cuz It's Not Bad Enough I Need The Strong Ones Constantly Rn - Tumblr Posts

this one time in high school I got really sick, but like, not that sick, because my only symptoms were congestion and a really, really sore throat. but it was getting really close to finals week. and I was a freshman. and my math teacher did not like freshmen.

like, I'm not sure he disliked freshmen more than a lot of teachers probably do. it was probably a normal amount of disliking. and I don't think he graded us worse or anything. but he was vocal about it. he liked to call freshmen "weak butter." no kidding. I guess because he thought freshmen were generally too weak and soft. like he was an army commander or whatever—idk anything about military ranks. I don't think he was ever actually in the military, but he coached the golf team, so I guess that's pretty similar.

he always said stuff like how being sick isn't a real reason not to come to school. old people stuff or whatever. he was one of those "you better be in the hospital" kinda guys. he always said whenever he started feeling bad he would just drink some orange juice and have some mint ice cream.

I tried that once. it didn't work and was also just not a very good flavor combination.

anyways, back to me getting sick.

so my throat hurt really bad. like, super bad. so bad. like you know when you burn your tongue really bad and suddenly you're like wow I never knew bread was so scratchy? like that. on fire.

we generally had a bag of cough drops in the miscellaneous medicine bucket in the broom closet at my house. but there weren't a lot left, so I ate them all. we ran out. so my dad got more, and he brought home one of those giant bags. the ones with like 80 cough drops. like it's not a truly unreasonable size, really, but that's a heck of a lot bigger than the normal-sized ones.

for whatever reason, I decided I was just going to bring around the whole thing instead of just taking some of them with me, so for like three days I had this enormous bag of hall's cherry-flavored cough drops in my backpack. I was eating them constantly. a continuous stream. like a chain smoker.

this is about the time I looked up on the internet if eating too many cough drops can be bad for you. the answer is basically no, unless you're eating them regularly, which just decreases the efficacy (makes sense) or if you ate like a thousand in five seconds, which I'm pretty sure isn't very possible. so I was safe.

but yeah, there I was, ploughing through this giant bag of cough drops like there was no tomorrow and they were the miniature hard candy angels bringing me relief for today. I had cough drop wrappers in my jacket pockets for months afterward. so I'm like "yeah this seems like a concerning amount of cough drops. I could have perhaps stayed home instead of coming to school. that might've been wise. but I powered through, just like [math teacher] says."

so I went up to him and wanted to let him know that I suffered through it as per his advice and he just said "well, of course."

and the sheer disappointment from that reaction has instilled the need to approach every sore throat since then with the same strategy of gorging myself on cough drops, whether I stay home or not. hope you're happy, dude.