If you’re going to fly for nearly 20 hours through multiple time zones dressed in a pair of kangaroo-themed pajamas, jolting in and out of sleep in contravention of your normal circadian rhythm, you should take it easy on the medication. No one wants to go crazy in a metal tube 40,000 feet above the Pacific. On the other hand, suspecting that you have fallen into a rift in the space-time continuum itself is perhaps as reasonable a response as any to the longest (so far) commercial flight in the world.

So there I was last month, six or so hours into Qantas’s first-ever nonstop flight from New York City to Sydney. It was 3 a.m. New York time, which made it No O’clock in the tiny upscale refugee camp created by the airline. I had been suffering from congestion, the kind that migrates around your sinuses and then becomes an infection in your ear. While I was no longer contagious, there was some issue about the future of my ability to hear. The internet did not have good news. “Flying with an ear infection doesn’t always result in a ruptured eardrum,” one website said.

Basically, I had been taking decongestants since midafternoon. I felt like a junkie in a gritty TV show about Times Square in the 1970s, nervous and sweaty and incoherent even as I was beset by an achy, leaden inertia. Soon the lights would go down, part of the airline’s next planned group activity (sleeping) and I would make perhaps the gravest pharmaceutical error of my adult life. But that was still in the future.