My First Time I Ate Too Many Cough Drops and Threw Up in the School Nurse’s Office and got to go Home

I was in the second grade at Line Creek Elementary school in Kansas City, Missouri and had a nagging loud cough. My teacher, Mrs. Dunning, found my cough to be a bit disruptive, and allowed me to take a Jolly Rancher from the jar of candy she kept on her desk that she gave out occasionally as a reward. She explained to me that a Jolly Rancher was basically the same thing as a cough drop, and as a seven-year-old kid I wasn’t going to argue with that logic. My cough persisted, and my parents allowed me to pick out some cough drops to take to school with me the next day. I’d heard stories from other kids about the deliciousness of Luden’s cherry cough drops, and convinced my parents to buy me a pack. Luden’s cherry cough drops were a deep red color, and even though its packaging claimed it as a reliever of coughs and sore throats, it tasted like any other cherry hard candy.

As soon as I was outside of my parent’s immediate attention, I started popping the cough drops, one after another, savoring the sweetness. I chewed them, a few at a time, not waiting for them to dissolve in my mouth as directed. I had finished off the entire box well before lunch time, and before too long a deep pain started throbbing in my stomach. I told Mrs. Dunning about my discomfort, and she gave me the laminated nurse’s pass she kept at her desk. I went to the nurse’s office, where there was a girl sitting on a vinyl bench that was covered with a strip of paper. The nurse told me to sit down next to the girl, and that she would get to me as soon as she could. I made my way over to the bench, but before I could take my seat, I felt my tongue grow large in the back of my throat. I tried to tell the nurse that something was wrong, but as I opened my mouth a torrent of deep red liquid poured out and landed on the paper on the bench, right next to the waiting girl. She screamed a loud and piercing scream as the regurgitated Ludens puddled up next to her, and the nurse rushed over from behind her desk. She cleaned up the mess, which fortunately had kept to the strip of paper, and arranged to call my parents to come and take me home.

My parents were both working and couldn’t come to pick me up, but a friend of the family was reached, and was able to take me over to his house until my parents could get me. His name was Doug, and he worked with my Dad and attended the same church as my family. Funny enough, he always had Jolly Ranchers in his pockets on Sundays at church, and he would throw them at the kids. I got to hang out at his house for a few hours, where I watched Nickelodeon on his cable television, (which my family didn’t have) and drank Coca Cola (which my parents never let me drink). This wasn’t the Nickelodeon of today, this was the mid-eighties Nickelodeon with shows like “Pinwheel” and “Today’s Special,” which was a terrifying show about a department store with mannequins that came to life at night when nobody was around. Eventually, my parents came and took me home, and I got over my cough, but not before my young mind made a few connections as to how the world could work given the right circumstances. Eating too many Luden’s cherry cough drops could give you a stomach ache and cause you to throw up in the nurse’s office at school, but that momentary discomfort could lead to an afternoon of creepy cable children’s programming and all the forbidden Coke you could drink.