I awoke this morning with a fever. I was afraid of this. I’ve been Zicamming since the girls were born, nuking every sneeze, throat tickle etc. because I don’t have time to suffer through a cold and I can’t risk bringing any infection near them. They’re three months old now and their immunities are probably through the roof but I don’t want to risk making Katie sick.
Jay has been sick for nearly a week and this time it wasn’t just a cold. He was feverish last weekend. I haven’t seen the babies in nearly two weeks and I was planning on visiting them this coming weekend but I’ve caught whatever Jay’s got.
Like most viral infections, it began as nothing more than a tickle in the back of my throat. I started Zicam immediately but three days later, I was hacking and coughing and then, this morning; fever.
I always forget how crappy even a low grade fever can make you feel. The first time I got up, around 7:30, I knew the instant I stood up, what was going on. My head swam, the floor felt like it was twelve feet below me and my back ached like I’d spent the night hauling tree trunks.
I went back to bed. I dozed for another three hours and finally got up again. It took me a half an hour to drag myself to the kitchen for some Tylenol and ice water. During that half hour, I think my fever broke: I was sweaty and gross. Plus, I began to feel better immediately upon takng the Tylenol. I know it doesn’t work that fast, so I think that’s what happened. I made some coffee, too. By noon, I felt good enough to eat something.
Now it’s nearly time for me to take another dose of pills and I’m in bed, propped up against a bank of pillows, writing. I feel much better than I did this morning, which got me to thinking about aspirin and other pain relievers.
Why do we name streets, airports and sporting arenas after politicians instead of those real heroes like whoever it was that invented (or discovered) aspirin? Here in Minneapolis, we named a (now defunct) sports dome and an airport terminal after a guy who never even got elected president. The highest he rose was Vice President and as everyone knows, that’s not even a real job, anyway.
I’m not on any daily medications but every time I get sick, hurt or have an allergic reaction, I can’t help but think ‘God bless big pharmaceutical!’
If it wasn’t for antihystamines, I may very well have choked to death on my own tongue several years ago. If it weren’t for Nasonex, Josie’s childhood would have been an unrelenting agony of swollen glands, gasping for breath and the overwhelming desire to rip her itchy eyes right out of her own head.
And we’re not even sick!
How many people, all over the world, depend on chemistry for their very lives?
Which brings me to the latest Netflix original TV show that I just finished, The Iron Fist. It’s a Kung-fu melodrama that begins when the hero, Danny Rand, heir to billions and assumed dead for 15 years, returns to NYC and the corporation his father helped found.
I don’t know what else Rand might be into but it’s made clear that one of their departments is pharmaceutical research and development. At his first board meeting as the majority stock holder, Danny is horrified that his company plans to sell a recent breakthrough therapy, that will cure a fatal disease, for a large profit.
“We’re going to profit off of people’s suffering?” he demands in self-righteous indignation.
This scene is clearly meant to establish Danny’s good guy credentials but all it really established was that the writers of the show are idiots.
The entire board of Rand sits there like a bunch of dopes as Danny declares that the new drug should be sold at cost. Not a single one of them has the wit to ask Danny this question:
“How do you think we got dozens of the most ingenious chemists in the world to dedicate years of their lives to concentrating on the problem of curing this disease?”
Danny of course has never contemplated the problem of disease from this angle. He apparently thinks that medical breakthroughs just happen. Like thunderstorms.
“The answer, Danny, is that we pay them.” I would have wanted the Rand board character to continue. “We pay them very well. There’s no glamor in the career of a pharmaceutical chemist; none of them will ever be famous but here at Rand, we can at least make sure that these unsung heroes are compensated, if not what they’re worth to mankind, at least to the best of our ability. Sure, we could sell this new therapy at cost. And we’d all feel pretty good about ourselves. But Rand isn’t about allowing a dozen board members to feel like Albert Schwietzer, Rand is about making profits so we can continue to pay our people to come up with the next life saving breakthrough. No, Danny: we’re not going to profit off of people’s suffering. We’re going to profit off the alleviation of their suffering.”
Would that have been so hard?
Accusing Big Pharma of profiting off of people’s suffering is like accusing farmers of profiting off of starvation.
All I know is that this morning, when I awoke with a fever, I’d have paid fifty bucks for an aspirin if that’s what it would take to feel as good as I do now and my paltry fever wasn’t going to kill me.