After graduation the last thing you think about is health insurance. That is, until you get sick. I’ve been working without health insurance for over two years and it has taught me a few tricks. Fortunately, the only pharmacist I see these days has his office on the corner of a shady block while hanging out with girls whose first names end in “iqua.”

We all had insurance in college because it came with tuition. Once I graduated, I had a false sense of security like when white guys think they could never get AIDS because their method of prevention before raw dogging a girl is asking if she ever slept with a black guy.

Recently, I was invited to a party at a friend’s place in Brooklyn. Wet behind the ears, I ventured to the land of hipsters. After the usual conversational bullshit, I was lured to the beer pong table the same way cokeheads have an instant attraction to tables with mirrors. The cups were already setup due to a pongflare. We loaded up and I brought more heat than a broken thermostat. Three games later, I was usurped by someone with state schooling but it couldn’t have come at a better time because women were starting to show up.

Unfortunately, hipster women are like a mixed bag of Hershey’s fun size bag minis. The Krackle and Good Bars are few and generally spoke for while the Plain Chocolates show up in mass amounts. The Dark Chocolates are left for the end of the night when you’re too drunk to tell the difference between nuts or rice but want some chocolate anyway.

Speaking of dark chocolate, I met a girl who wanted me to guess her name and instantly I thought about picking one of the hood rats my street pharmacist bangs. I shouldn’t have entertained this behavior because guessing names is for children but people were surrounding us as if I was in for a real treat. I guessed Michelle. She said her name was Obama. That was the extent of our conversation. My only thought was if Obama didn’t get reelected, she might as well off herself. I can only imagine twenty years from now, this trick’s husband would be introducing his wife and someone will reply, “Your wife was named after that black President?” I fixed myself something stronger and went to the balcony for a smoke. Little did I know I was being followed.

If you are ever given a choice between going downstairs or out to the fire escape for a smoke, get walking because anything short of a fire means you don’t have an escape route on a fire escape. As soon I lit up, a loose hygiene hipster approached me for a drag. He said he had been trying to quit. I knew he couldn’t afford cigarettes, let alone soap. I let him have a drag and he bored me about his dream to become a musician. I would have passed on the small talk but people who ask something from you have the self absorbed delusion to think minor conversation is an equal quid pro quo when in reality it is a waste of time. The rest of the night cycled through the same. Beer pong, boring people, and cigarettes on the fire escape fueled with beer until I woke up the next morning.

As you get older you get familiar with your body. You know when it works and when it does not. I woke up hung over as shit but something else wasn’t right. I was sick. I started to cycle through my night as to how this could possibly happen. I know I didn’t hookup because there was no one blowing me for breakfast. Nobody looked sick at the party. Sure some of them dressed funny, but it was hardly an excuse for being sick.

Then it sunk in – the beer pong and the shared cigarettes. If you don’t have insurance, you shouldn’t play beer pong. A mediocre night resulted in something I knew could be a throat infection. I ran to the medicine cabinet the same way women do to hide the crab cream. I took the typical drug cocktail – naproxen and vitamin C. I put on the teapot because I knew I would need to burn down this crap coating my throat. Doctors always recommend the salt water gargle but I had learned a thing or two from this kind of risky behavior. In addition, I grabbed a tea bag. If you add tea to the salt water mix it assists in opening and cleaning your throat. This was the climax of my fight back to healthy living. I needed water to flush out my system so I bought a one liter bottle and filled it with menthol cough drops. After sipping on it and keeping regular on my over the counter drugs, I was better by Monday morning. And that is how you get better when you’re sick without insurance. Seems quick? It’s because it works faster and harder than third world country kids who are eager to take your job for half the cost and one day weekends.

If you have any of your own home brewed remedies – feel free to share them in the comments section.