Tylenolicious

The worst thing about being sick is this:

Tylenol.

I have a chest cold, one of those that manifests three nights ago as a little tickle in the back of your throat and overnight turns into wheezing and coughing like I’ve just run the Dust Bowl Marathon. It’s not the kind of sick I can deal with easily, either. I have chronic migraines, and while those constitute their own little circle of hell, at least I know how to cope with them: avoid bright lights and loud noises, lie down if I can, and meds, meds, meds. I’m a big believer in the pharmaceutical industry. Their marketing may be unconscionable, but anything that helped in the invention of Demerol gets the benefit of the doubt from me.

But like I said, Tylenol…

When did everything OTC suddenly have to have a flavor? Who even wanted it to? I’m of the ’70s generation, when NyQuil was only available in “green death flavor” (with apologies to Denis Leary), when a pill that rendered you unconscious for the entire allergy season was accepted and loved, when parents everywhere looked at any scrape or cut that didn’t go all the way through the body as a put-a-Band-Aid-on-it opportunity. It was medicine’s job to  taste disgusting if you let it sit in your mouth more than the two seconds required to raise the glass to your lips. The only flavored medicine I remember from my childhood was Robitussin, available in Cherry Unconsciousness. It clung to your lips for hours after you swallowed it, like the poison from Snow White’s apple.

Tylenol, that old warhorse, has apparently discovered everyone’s inner child and now makes their OTC cold/cough/allergy remedies “available in new Cool Burst flavor.”

Huh?

I didn’t think anything of this ’til I popped a couple of these in my mouth and was rewarded with the pitiful shadow of mint, like water in which a cheap after-dinner mint dissolved sometime last Tuesday. It was foul and vile and completely took my mind off my coughing and wheezing for as long as it took me to dig a Luden’s Throat Drop (now there’s cherry flavor for you!) out of the junk drawer and pop it into my mouth. Cool Burst, my ass; more like watered-down nausea.

I just wonder who came up with this and why. Am I the last to know it’s become fashionable to let plain old Tylenol-flavored Tylenol dissolve in your mouth now, like some kind of hazing ritual? Was there a great backlash against plain Tylenol from the Mint Growers of America? Had licking tablets of acetaminophen suddenly replaced licking toads as sport among the oxycontin-for-fun set?

I don’t know what prompted the question, but Cool Burst Tylenol isn’t the answer. Except it is — it’s the only way Tylenol specialties come now, Cool Burst or nothing. I’m reminded of an inventive vampire novel I read recently, in which vampires had become the world’s majority population and old useless items like boxes of cereal and bottles of aspirin were hot collectors’ items on eBay.

Where, come to think of it, I haven’t yet looked for plain old Tylenol, but it doesn’t seem like a bad place to start.