Ten years without caffeine ...

My First Period Class was afraid of me.

I love coffee. I love the taste. I love the smell. I love the warm feeling. I even like iced coffee drinks. And for ten years this month I have not been able to have real coffee. I have had decaf everything.

It was joked in my 20s that my blood type was “House Blend”. I would drink pots and pots of coffee a day, huge cups of it at a time. When I went to Italy and was introduced accidentally to straight espresso I even started to scare people with how much coffee and caffeine I could consume.

And then it came back to haunt me. I was in the shower and lost my balance and hit my head and found out that I have a type of low blood pressure. The doctor “recommended” that I not just cut back on the caffeine, but that I eliminate it.

I did.

For a month I had headaches that you would not believe.

In May of that year when finishing up my student teaching my first period class disclosed their general fear of me. Well, I was going through caffeine withdrawals that semester and probably took some of it out on them.

And to this day, I avoid caffeine. It is an absolute pain to do so. At stadiums I have to order Sprite or its equivalent and can rarely get decaf coffee. I go to parties and can’t find anything to drink other than water. On occasion I have accidentally had the caffeine and get a jolt from it. When I order an Irish Coffee I usually have to wait for them to brew up the decaf.

People will ask me how I do it. I usually make something up about diet and exercise and drinking water that has some measure of truth in it. Basically, it is still sometimes hard to do when there is a Starbucks on every corner …

The only real exception has been at Ozzfest this summer. It was muggy and getting to the water fountains could take a while. There was an energy drink giving away free cans … and since it was early and going to be a long day I drank a couple of them. Hole Moley Andy! I can’t remember getting a buzz like that in years. The headache I had the next day was for different reasons than the headaches many other concert goers probably had.

But, here it is, ten years on and I still stay away from the caffeine.