Pregnancy has a way of complicating things. I mean it's a wonderful, beautiful thing, and the miracle of life, blah blah blah. But there is also the inability to stay up past 9pm or button my pants. And when I started getting a cold a week ago, there was the complication of what I could or couldn't take for it. Now, I'm not one to take medication for the duration of a cold, but I do like to sleep at night, so I checked the reference sheet from my doctor on pregnancy do's and don'ts. According to that, I can take Sudafed and some version of Robitussin. Armed with that knowledge I headed off to the pharmacy.

There is an episode of Everyone Hates Chris where he talks about his mom always buying generic versions of food. When it shows the things she's buying, everything is in a plain white package with black lettering telling you what knock-off item you're about to purchase. I wish my pharmacy had a section like that with just one kind of Sudafed. Instead, I was forced to choose between about 6 different kinds of name brand and generic Sudafeds. Some were just for congestion while others covered the whole spectrum of symptoms. Each one had the same active ingredient for congestion though, and the pain relievers were always Tylenol, so I figured it didn't matter too much which one I picked. But just to be sure, I asked the pharmacist whether the box I had was safe to take during pregnancy. She took a look at it, checked a list somewhere, and directed me to the kind of Sudafed that you have to buy from behind the pharmacy counter. I hadn't even considered this option, and when I got it, I realized that it had an entirely different active ingredient than the other Sudafeds. As it turns out, this other ingredient is what used to be the ingredient of choice for congestion, but now it's the ingredient of choice for making meth. But there is a generic, so I just had to show my driver's license and pay $1.50.

Always curious about things like this, the first thing I did when I got home was google the difference between the new Sudafed and the old Sudafed, especially as it applies to pregnancy. I'm sure it drives doctors and nurses crazy when people start any medical question with "I was reading on the internet...." but I would rather look something up on WebMD than leave a message for my nurse every time some odd question pops in my head. And what I found was that there isn't a consensus on what kind of Sudafed pregnant women. So I just did what I should have done to begin with and called my doctor's office for some clarification. The answer I got was that I shouldn't be taking the one the pharmacist gave me because there was a risk of increased heart rate.

So I'm back at square one and still can't stop coughing. I would have trusted either the nurse or the pharmacist if I'd only been able to get advice from one of them, but when they contradicted each other, I just decided not to take sides. Besides, cold medicine doesn't really help get rid of the cold, it just makes you feel better, right? So I'm just put on my big girl panties and dealt with it. When it comes to colds, I'd rather not medication anyway. When it comes time for an epidural....well, that'll be another story!