Shoppers, make way for the sick dude wobbling down aisle 9

BOTH OF US were sick, but I was the one at the store.

We were the coughing-sniffling-sore-throat-body-aches-and-turning-over-and-waking-the-other-person-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night kind of sick. One minute we were reaching for sweatpants, hooded sweatshirts and blankets, and the next we were wondering, "Hey, when did it get so hot in here?"

After 30 months of marriage I can authoritatively tell you this is the problem with the whole "in sickness and in health" thing you agree to at the altar. I kind of assumed it meant one of you would be healthy and able to go to the store. But what if you're both sick?

Since it was my wife's birthday, I went to the grocery store to get us the few items needed for the evening. Her delectable birthday dinner featured a wheat appetizer called Triscuits and a popular cold dessert known as ice cream.

When you're sick, the trip to the store is torture. The price of orange juice goes up, there is a run on all vitamins except those that go under a dog's tongue and the free cookies are gone.

I'd heard at work that ice cream was on sale two for one, but as I turned the corner to the frozen foods section, a man had stacked his ice cream pints about six high. He was holding the freezer door open for me to examine the barren shelves.

Sorry, he said, and lumbered toward the checkout. I wanted to cough.

I picked through the dregs and decided on peanut butter ice cream, which, while soothing, is a long way from Mint Chocolate Cookie or the spectacular banana goodness in Chunky Monkey.

It seems unfair that healthy people get all the good food. When I'm sick, I just want some Chunky Monkey!

I'd like to propose a sick section of the grocery store. Maybe 5 percent of the items in the store should be reserved for people who are ill. Anyone with a fever over 100 would be eligible. I'd happily give up food for them - if they were really sick.

But aside from looking at a get-well card showing a shirtless guy named Dr. Doug wearing a stethoscope, this was not the worst part of the trip.

That was surely the medicine aisle.

There are two types of people who shop in the medicine aisle. The first are healthy people. They know what they want. They walk briskly, weave between parked carts, pick up what they need and leave without inhaling.

Then there's everyone else, like me on Monday. They look at boxes, pick them up, put them in the cart, look at them again to make sure they didn't miss a side effect, then put them back on the shelf. They squint. They have lost the ability to adequately pronounce decongestant. They try to stay away from any box that has a sunshine on it.

I picked up something orange because I rationalized that the color orange makes me feel better. It's a citrus color, which brings to mind vitamin C. Plus, I liked the order of symptoms on the package: cold/body aches/cough/nasal decongestant as opposed to cough/nasal decongestant/cold/body aches.

It may have been made by Willy Wonka.

When I went to check out, the cashier looked at the two pints of ice cream, the two cans of chicken soup, the two packages of cold medicine - neither of which had a sunshine on the box - and past my glassy eyes and asked for my ID. I got carded.

If this sounds weird, there's a chance you haven't been sick in the past year. Or, like me, you've stocked up on cold medicines and have your own pharmacy in the medicine cabinet. (I only recently threw out some Halls I acquired during a bout of mono in 1996.) But in the past 18 months, things have changed. Now you have to show ID for many cold medicines.

Because nothing shouts drug abuse like overpriced chicken soup and ice cream.

I wanted to stick out my tongue and say something other than, "Ahhh."

But I was so tired, and Triscuits and ice cream sounded so good.

Mike Gruss, (757) 446-2277 mike.gruss@pilotonline.com