I love being married: The sleepless Tylenol run

I love being married. No, really. I know stand-up comedians make joke after joke about how awful it is, but I think it’s great. We have so many wonderful experiences together.

Take what happened recently, for instance. My beautiful wife had gone to bed early since she had to get up early for work the next day, which means I had to get up early the next day too. But then, around 12:30 AM, she wakes me up.

“Honey, I have a headache.”

“So teigsom medsin.” (I’m not always the most clearly-spoken person five seconds after awaking.)

“We don’t have any.”

“…wha?”

“We had some, but it’s expired.”

Now, it’s a well-known fact that once the expiration date stamped on a box or bottle of medicine or vitamins passes, those pills instantly turn into fatal poison and should not be consumed under any circumstances. This is an incontrovertible law of the galaxy, much like gravity. Just ask my wife.

“I need you to go to the store and get me some Tylenol.”

I don’t want to go to the store and get her Tylenol. I want to continue sleeping on the bed; the soft, warm, wonderful bed. But here’s a tip for the newlywed guys out there: if your wife doesn’t want you to sleep, you ain’t sleepin’, at least not on the bed. Previous hard-earned experience has taught me that if I tried to suggest that she go get her own damn medicine, or that she just take the expired stuff, or that she just go back to sleep… all of those things would set off a chain of events the result of which would be that there would be no comfortable sleep to be had the rest of the night, and likely no sleep at all. The fastest way back to slumberland, the true path of least resistance, is for me to get my ass out of bed and go get her some Tylenol.

“…kay.”

“Make sure to buy Tylenol. It works the best.”

“…kay.”

Eleven minutes later, I’m squinting my way through the way-too-bright florescent glare of the local twenty-four-hour supermarket. I find the extra-strength Tylenol, and then next to it I find the store brand equivalent for $6 cheaper. Let’s see… 500mg of acetaminophen per dose in this box, and 500mg of acetaminophen per dose in that box. My still-cloudy mind calculates the odds are perhaps two out of three that she will not appreciate that I saved six bucks by buying the non-Tylenol-brand Tylenol and will chew me out about it. Okay, I’ll take those odds. I grab the store brand box.

Back home. I enter the bedroom, where she’s lying in bed poking at her phone. I hand her the box. “Here you go.”

“Thank you, hon– is this Tylenol?”

Damn. “It’s the same thing. I was–“

“No it’s not! Tylenol is better!”

“I was very careful to check the boxes. It’s 500 milligrams of acetaminophen, just like the Tylenol, and it was six dollars cheaper.”

“But it won’t work! I told you to get the Tylenol!”

Oh, God. Please don’t make me go back to the store and exchange it. Maybe I can still save this…

“Look, just try it, okay? I promise it will work. It’s the same thing, I promise.”

“It’s not the same!” But, hallelujah, she’s opening the box. It’s clear that I still didn’t win this thing and God help me if I pull a stunt like this again before this incident fades into memory, but she’ll try the cheap acetaminophen anyway. Sleep is mine!

Well, almost. It had to be less than ten minutes after we had returned to bed when I hear a noise that strikes an icicle of dread into my beating heart…

“Huac.”

You see, “huac” is, as close as I can transliterate it, the noise my wife makes when she’s about to throw up. When she was pregnant, I became quite familiar with this sound, because she pukes a lot when she’s pregnant. Several times every night, and of course during the day too. Like, “did you even eat that much?” volumes of vomit. In fact, early on into our first pregnancy, we took her to a doctor because we thought there might be something wrong with her causing her to barf that much.

“Don’t worry,” the doctor said. “It’s quite normal, especially during the first pregnancy, for a woman to experience freq–“

“Huac.”

Also, you need to understand that, in our relationship, vomiting is a shared experience. Well, when she does it, anyway. When I hear that “huac,” I am to be right alongside her as she makes her way to pray at the porcelain altar, despite there not really being anything I can do, from my perspective anyway, to help in the situation. if I’m not there, you see, I’m an asshole who doesn’t really care if she’s sick, and I trade the two minutes of glorious sleep I was able to hold tenuously on to while she was puking by herself for at least fifteen minutes of sleepless reception of a chewing-out. (And then, of course, after the baby is born, the frequent nightly wifey-barfing sessions are replaced with frequent nightly baby-feeding sessions, which sometimes also involved baby-barfing sessions. Sleep was definitely at a premium during those months.)

So once again, just as Pavlov’s dog came running for his food bowl when he heard the bell, the “huac” prompts me to stumble again out of bed and escort my wife to the bathroom. She successfully pukes, then washes out her mouth with water from the bathroom sink.

“Why did you throw up?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not pregnant again, are you?”

“I just had my period, idiot.”

Right. I probably would have remembered that if I were fully awake.

“Do you think the medicine will still work?” she asks.

“Uh, no. You probably threw it up.”

Well, she takes half a dose more, and… goes back to sleep for the rest of the night. Which means I got to sleep the rest of the night too. Hooray! To this day, we’re not sure what made her barf, but it thankfully wasn’t the painkiller. Or a fetus.

We wake up to the sound of the alarm on her phone the next morning, a little worse for the wear, but not nearly as drowsy as we could have been had I handled the situation contrary to my training.

Okay, so to you single guys, I probably just made this marriage thing sound perfectly dreadful. After all, you all get to go to bed whenever the hell you want and wake up whenever the hell you want, with no need to make midnight medicine runs or vomit support missions. To which I say, well, there’s no other woman in the world I’d rather lose sleep for, and I hope you all have the good fortune of finding such a woman for you some day.

Image sources: X-ray, Tylenol (composition by me)