Sick on Santorini (cont'd)

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Last night I tried the grappa cure, substituting ouzo, but it didn't seem to work. Perhaps, given my notably higher alcoholic tolerance than the only person I know on whome the grappa cure works, I needed more than one ouzo. Perhaps I needed to add in a carafe of retsina and a few shots of raki. At any rate, I decided to turn my luck back to the small Hellenic pharmacy I have going on my nightstand here. My two trips to the local pharmakeio thus far have yielded the following:

1) Clarityne-D: A perfectly normal medicinal name. In the corner of the box it describes the contents as "14 Repetabs," repetab apparently being the Greek term for "pill the size of a golf ball you're supposed to swallow twice a day to stop your runny nose," although, considering the size of these things, I wonder if it might not be more convenient simply to stuff one up each nostril.

2) Herb Balsam Candies: The Greek name says "caramels with cherries," and indeed the box has a nice close-up of cherries on it. However, this photo is the only aspect of the product to which the phrase "with cherries" is referring, for there is a noted lack of any sweet fruity taste in what can only loosly be termed the "candies" themselves.

This is too bad, for it would help mask the competing flavors of the rose hip extracts (by which they mean they extracted the most foul-tasting fluids from the rose hips and included them here), acelora, deadly nightshade (I'm guessing), and balsamic vinegar — which is all I can figure the "balsam" in the name is referring to, seeing as how there is very little that is soothing about these candied lozenges, least of which would be the color, which is roughly that of raw sewage, chosen by the same 60s medical philosophy that felt painting all hospital walls puke green is somehow more conducive to the healing process, when in fact the opposite is true.

3) Depon: One of those plop-plop-fizz-upchuck forms of analgesics that were banned by national law in the US several decades ago yet remains one of Europe's most popular forms of self-medication. At the bottom of the box it proclaims proudly "Does not irritate stomach!" It wisely does not mention, however, anything about irritating the taste buds or esophagus, inflicting upon the former the vile taste combination of aniseed and rubber bands, and coating the latter with a kind of scratchy chalk, which I believe is interfering with the efficacy of the Herb Balsam Candies.

It is supposed to relieve "headache, fever, toothache, neuralgias, muscle pains, arthalgias, and menstrual pains." My headache and fever have not seemed to abate much yet, and I don't have a dictionary on hand to find out whether I suffer from neuralgias (though if hat describes the condition of "brain not working properly," I certainly hope this stuff is efficacious because mine has been on the fritz for days now — and before you can say anything, I came up with a 50-cent word like "efficacious" only four months after the fact when I was marking this up for the Web site). However, I am happy to report that the menstrual pains have all but disappeared.

4) Mucosolvan: I'm supposed to swig this viscous yellow stuff four times a day. It's my favorite of the names, more descriptive of the bottle's contents themselves rather than the symptom it is meant to relieve, a expectorant that apparently works on the principle that nothing gets up mucous like drinking bottled snot.

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