Shameless Display of My Shame

I wrote this a while ago, but had been saving it. Then I got bronchitis a couple weeks ago, and it added a certain piquant pertinence (!) to this entry. So please, enjoy it.

As I often write, my health, especially in winter, has necessitated an intake of a certain liquid medication that is a popular recreational drug for young people (and at least one middle aged expat) in Hong Kong.

Yes, I drink a lot of cough syrup when its cold. Because I am often sick all f@#$ing winter.  My doctor used to tell me she was tired of looking at me and to stop getting sick.

I used to average 3-4 chest infections a year. Bronchitis, sinus infections, the full boat, as they say.

I’ve already had it once this ‘winter.’

Remember a couple years ago when the Yellow Dust came down and tripled the pollution record? I remember it.

I’ll never forget it, because it gave me a chest infection AND a sinus infection. At the same time.

Good times.

The most common symptom of many of my illnesses is coughing. I need to do something about that.

I drink cough syrup. I’m usually so sick for so long that the single bottle I get prescribed doesn’t last. So I need to buy more. 

The cough syrup here contains ephedrine and codeine, and while you’re supposed to have a prescrīption, it rarely matters.

Some day I want to try and buy some morphine, just to see the look on the man’s face. But the joke will probably be on me when he plunks it on the counter.

It got so bad that a lot of dispensaries (pharmacies to us Americans) became like neighborhood bars; as soon as I walked in and was seen, the proprietor would simply put the cough syrup on the counter, like pouring a regular his usual.

It got so bad that I learned about the different grades of cough syrup, in terms of the ratio of codeine. The regular stuff is 5mg codeine to 10ml of syrup. The strong stuff is 10mg to 10ml.

Don’t make any plans.

It got so bad that I could tell which dispensaries sold me which version of the syrup, and I would shop accordingly.

I drank so much cough syrup that one time I went into a dispensary and the guy walked into the back (where they keep the good stuff) and came back out with 9 bottles of it, dropped them on the counter and looked at me like “Here, you f@#$in’ junkie, is this enough?”

I haven’t been back since.

It got so bad that I bought a hip flask on Temple St. to put my cough syrup in. Because no one in HK bats an eye when a gweilotakes a drink at lunchtime.

Or 9:00AM.

It got so bad that the last time I went to one of my ‘regular’ dispensaries (the same night I watched  East Meets West 2011), the guy just smirked and sold me two bottles instead of one.

It’s nice to be remembered.

I remember watching Kung Fu Mahjong 3 in the cinema. I was sick, and during the film I needed to drink more cough syrup. But I fumbled with the cap and dropped it.

I heard it skitter away under the seats and found myself staring at a mostly full bottle of cough syrup that was now topless.

What to do?

What else to do?

I drank it.

All of it.

After the movie (which was so bad that not even my narcotic state could make it bearable), I hurried home, sure that I would fall into a coma at any moment.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, the ephedrine kept me awake until 4:00 AM.

Still, I wasn’t coughing, so I guess it was okay.

I’m not proud of drinking so much cough syrup. I don’t like being almost chronically ill during winter. In fact, I’ve seriously started to consider leaving this ever-more-polluted city that I actually really love. That’s how bad it’s getting.

Thankfully I haven’t needed it anywhere near as much since I changed jobs, which is as good a commercial for stress avoidance as you’re likely to get.

Still, old habits die hard, no matter how hard you kick them.

So to speak.

A while back, I saw this on eBay and just had to have it.

 Can you blame me?