So I accidently drugged myself...

Oh, birthdays. Milestone birthdays. How fun are they? So fun. I’ve just hit one. I’m not going to say which one and you’re not going to ask me. Actually I’d like to hit this birthday milestone in the face.

Your birthday is the one day of the year when you gratefully receive a card from a person professing to be your friend that includes a so-called humourous reference to how freakin’ old you are. This can go on for days and days. Such fun for everyone except the birthday man.

For my birthday this year I popped down to my local beach, that place where water and sand are magically transformed into a petri dish of potential staph infections. Oh, and I also accidently drugged myself.

I was going to be sharing the driving, but for half of the trip I would play passenger, which is often a problem because I get carsick. Not vomiting carsick, thank goodness, but awfully nauseous nonetheless. Some people have real problems in their life; this is mine.

I feel for those people I see on the side of the road throwing up, but they perhaps shouldn’t have eaten that slice of pepperoni pizza or drank that can of coke before their journey. One has to prepare when one gets carsick. Before I go on a long drive I prep myself just like a heavy weight boxer, except without all the carbs and starving and skipping and whatever. So possibly nothing like that.

I usually take Travelcalm before I depart for the open roads, which is super-duper at kicking carsickness in the bum. When I say I usually take it, I mean I generally forget a lot, which is why I don’t ingest sugar, fat,  milk or anything else that will ride my stomach like a roller coaster beforehand. I bet you’re saying to yourself, “hey idiot, why don’t you leave the Travelcalm in the glove compartment of your car?”, and to that I say, “that’s probably a good idea. Thanks!”

So on this occasion, I get to my travel buddy's house and realise I am devoid of any type of nausea killers. I wasn’t about to be nauseous on my birthday, damn it, so I went to the local drug store to purchase some of the good stuff.

Travelcalm wasn’t available, so I just grabbed some different ones. They’re all the same, aren’t they? No, no they’re not.

Did the pharmacist tell me that they are ideally ingested the night before, may cause stupidly intense drowsiness, and that it is best to stay out of strong sunlight? I don’t believe that happened at all. Given I was going to the beach that day and hanging out in the sun, that information would have been helpful.

She didn’t say any of that. She asked me if I had taken it before and I said I had taken Travelcalm. End of conversation. This little tablet was nothing like Travelcalm. The one time I don’t read the instructions for use is my bloody birthday.

You know the rest. After an hour I could barely keep my eyes open, so no driving for me. About four hours after I swallowed that thing I was practically crawling on my hands and knees at the beach, unable to walk any further or keep my eyes open because of the light. What the fuck is in those things? On the plus side, I was too drugged to feel queasy.