I’m Drungry!

I woke up this morning feeling just as sick as I have been all week, so on the advice of all you lovely readers, I have been sucking down tea with honey nonstop. Delicious! However, I also made the mistake of picking up some medicine at CVS. Specifically, I grabbed Sudafed PE Sinus and Allergy, Maximum Strength. It purportedly relieves sinus pressure, sinus and nasal decongestion, sneezing, and itchy, watery eyes. I thought this was absolutely perfect – nothing about a fever, chest congestion, or sore throat (none of which are symptoms that I have), and it covers allergies too. While I’ve never had allergies before, I’ve always heard that you can develop them as you get older, so I thought that was a possibility for what’s going on.

A few hours later, I am so loopy I don’t know what to do with myself. I honestly feel like I’m drunk (except there is no alcohol in this medication – I checked), in that I feel completely invincible and like I’m living in a dream world where nothing can go wrong. Unfortunately, there is a lot that can go wrong – particularly when I’m still at the office trying to get a five page single spaced status report out. You know it’s bad when I find my friend Jess’ suggestion (to just write “It’s all good” and hand it in) absolutely hilarious, and am somewhat tempted to do it (now you see how bad my judgment is after these meds and why I should probably not be at the office right now). Luckily, the teeny tiny part of my brain that is still rational is reminding me that I won’t be on this medication and feeling invincible forever, and I would probably regret a stunt like that. I’d even probably regret it sooner rather than later, since my boss is writing my performance review this weekend. Yikes!

However, in my drug-induced haze, I had an epiphany. I have been starving absolutely all day, even right after I eat a meal – nothing seems to sate me. I know they say to feed a cold and starve a fever, but this is ridiculous. There is no way that my body, which I normally try to listen to, is actually still hungry after all that I’ve eaten today… but here I sit, craving food, any food. That feeling of having the munchies combined with my feeling of invincibility and out-of-it-ness (I tried for two minutes to come up with a synonym for that but my brain will not function enough to provide one), just reminds me of being drunk. Therefore, I will take my sick brain and coin a new word: drunger, meaning “drunk hunger.” And right now, I am so drungry that I could easily go have a second lunch. Or three.

But my epiphany doesn’t stem from the foolish concatenation that I have coined “drungry.” Rather, it’s that when you are drunk, your body craves food in order to mitigate the effects of the alcohol and restore your system to normalcy – which is actually probably a good thing. Instead of cursing our craving for late night pizza, we should be embracing it. It’s not our body going haywire and wanting things it really doesn’t need; it’s your body telling you that it needs more fuel to burn off all the margaritas you have sucked down. Likewise, the drunger I have right now is my body’s reaction to the medication – it’s my body telling me to eat and flush the toxins out of my body. Unfortunately for me, my body is not realizing that this darn cold is what I want to flush out; not the good medications helping me to fix it.

So should I eat? Stop taking the pills? Or just deal with my drunken stupor and write “it’s all good” as the full text for my status report?

To look further into the future… do you think the people in my pace group will appreciate being led by a Sudafed-drunk pace team leader? If not, how long before the race should I stop taking the pills to avoid that situation? As always, your advice is much appreciated.