A few years ago, I wrote about the financial dangers of touring. It’s really easy to turn into a spend thrift without paying attention when your life is just wandering from place to place.

Lately, I’ve come to face to face with another money peril on tour.

Getting sick.

When you get sick at home, in your comfy apartment or house, you have a system. You may not know it, but you probably do. There’s probably a few cans of soup that only get used once your nose starts to run and you up your tea intake. You also turn to whatever your trusted medicine of choice is from DayQuil to Alkzaseltzer Cold & Sinus to Mucinex-D, whatever it is, you know you. So you start downing that stuff and ride out the cold like a sane person, perhaps using a few sick days.

On tour when you get sick, you lose your ever-loving mind.

Instead of acknowledging the reality that you’re just going to be sick for a few days, you buy every. single. cold. medicine in the local drug store. Guys, I seriously dropped like $75 on cold meds today in a Walgreens in the hopes that my financial offering could appease the runny nose and sore throat gods.

When I get a cold, I often lose my voice. My entire job revolves around being a communication hub on a headset. Yesterday, as I started to sink into my ill oblivion, complete with the beginnings of voice loss, my technical director started calling me Monster whenever I would make a call to the deck channel on my headset.

Today, which has fortunately been a day off, I woke up to my voice just totally gone. I went to check into my day room and couldn’t even croak out my name – I just had to hand over my driver’s license and point. It was amazing. And terrifying, because in 24 hours, I need to be able to talk again.

So rational Mel went out the window and crazy-sick-on-tour Mel went to Walgreens and bought roughly every kind of throat drop/throat coat they had and a fair smattering of cold medicines to add to the DayQuil/NyQuil/Mucinex-D combo I’m already rocking.

I didn’t even pay attention to the total until I dumped it all out of my bed at the hotel and thought I may have gone a little overboard. The total definitely made me wince but sick Mel was still in charge, so all of this seemed sort of reasonable – especially if anything in the bag worked.

And, for the most part, everything in that bag did what it claims to do, which is really just to help you tolerate symptoms that are going to take a few days to go away whether you are at home on a couch watching the Price is Right while recovering or on day 3 of 4 hours of sleep a night and loading in a massive, hateful set for the 3^rd time this week and reblocking the show for the 3^rd time this week because it doesn’t really fit in the venue it was booked into.

I do have to say that the Cold-Eeze splurge actually turned out to be kind of useful, I can croak out words again for a few minutes after sucking on one of those lozenges. But any way you slice it, getting sick on tour easily can become another financial danger zone.