My name is Doug and I am an addict. I’m addicted to caffeine. I’m also a recovering alcoholic who has been sober for 32 years, one month and three days as this is written.
Staying sober has been easier than my current struggle to stay off caffeine. I used to drink at least two pots of coffee a day or a gallon of ice tea. Neither were decaffeinated. Now I drink decaffeinated tea (green tea usually) and no coffee. I can’t stand the decaffeinated java. Too bitter.
After heart surgery and insertion of a wireless pacemaker in the lower cavity of my heart, the cardiologists told me to avoid use of alcohol and any drinks with caffeine. No problem with the alcohol. Received my 32 year sobriety chip from AA back in June.
But cutting out caffeine left me with massive headaches for two weeks. Even 500mgs of Bayer Back and Body capsules would not dull the headaches. Finally, as I entered the third week without caffeine, the headaches subsided. Blood pressure readings, taken at least three times a day, show normal readings.
The heart problem has me off salt, fried foods and on fruit, veggies, lean chicken and some pork. A steak on rare occasions. My weight is down, well below 200 but I can’t return to a gym for another month or two. No heavy lifting or use of machines like our riding lawn mower or tractor. One day, we hope, but not right now.
Fred First, a good friend who wrote the blog, Fragments from Floyd before leaving the county for a senior citizen complex in Missouri, wrote a good aricle about aging for his Substack Page.
I write this morning looking back on a half dozen years dominated by the ending of life among friends to begin life among strangers far away; from a place that is still home to me in name only—those same years past focused where we could not see but must go; years that left less of her and so also less of us, behind and ahead.
In this year’s-long span of change of person, personhood and place, I have been the recipient and bearer of emotions by type and by degree not known to the younger innocence I once owned.
I realize I had been, in those years, if not protected entirely at least buffered mercifully by benevolence against the bewilderment and terror of the kinds of grief and loss and their attendant feelings I now know too well.
I realize that, in those encounters with the hard facts of daily life diminished by her loss of memory, of reason, of self came wounds I had never known before or had did not known could be so intense, relentless and slow to resolution.
There have come emotions I did not recognize and therefore could not get hold of to wrestle with and bind up long enough to do the next thing that a reasonable man should do; must do. For there was no one but me to do those years of hard things.
Emotionally incompetent men are a risk to themselves and those around them. I didn’t and don’t want to be one of those men.
And so I am teaching myself to name, tame and shepherd my future emotional challenges so that bending does not lead to breaking. I have always claimed, in challenges to my bodily health, that naming your enemy is half the battle. Diagnosis is no less helpful against the assault of mental-emotional adversaries, who unnamed can wreak havoc.
Face to face with an opponent I can recognize, I stand a chance to stay standing and to be stronger the next time; because IT will come again. And I will be ready.
Fred, as he so often does, writes about problems we both share and does so much better than me. I’m a newsman, not a poet. Fred is a writer and poet: One that I envy.
I continue to hope that I can return, at some point in the near future, to a place where I can function as a writer, photographer and cinematographer who can capture life here in Floyd County, Southwestern Virginia and our nation.
Friends have encouraged me to be patient and recover. I am not a patient man but I am trying to learn how to become one. I’m not aging gracefully. I doubt I can do so. Whatever happens remains to be seen. As a recovering alcoholic, I have faced life one day at a time for 32 years, one month and three days.
Tomorrow is another day. I hope to keep facing more tomorrows until my time runs out.