A friend betrayed me

A friend betrayed me the other night, and not for the first time. Every time it happens, I don’t see it happening until after the fact. Getting old is weird.

The friend I’m talking about is one of my oldest and dearest friends, coffee—not the one in the photo, but its fraternal twin. The coffee in the photo is decaffeinated, and the one that betrayed me was not, and that’s the problem, Actually, it’s become a problem only as I got older.

There as a time when I drank a lot of coffee, especially in the time leading up to getting my stent, and again when I was having so much trouble with severe fatigue while I was on betablockers. The caffeine didn’t actually help, but at the time it felt like I was at least trying to do something about the problem when doctors didn’t seem to want to.

And this is where aging comes into it. At some point I noticed it was taking me longer to fall asleep if I had coffee “too late”. At some point I made 4pm my arbitrary cut-off time, but the problem returned. So, I moved the time back to 3pm with the same result. In the past couple years or so I moved it back to 2pm for the same reason. However, there have been times when I had coffee later in the day, like if I knew I was getting together with family and knew I needed to be awake enough to drive back home (as I’ve said several times before, if I drive anywhere I never drink alcohol, so this is about keeping me awake and alert at a time when I’m usually winding down for the night). That doesn’t usually cause me a problem.

Late Saturday afternoon, I decided I wanted a coffee, but I was out of decaffeinated. So, I made a real one. It doesn’t usually cause me any problem, so, why not? Because sometimes it does cause problems. If only I’d remember that.

What usually happens is that in the evening I feel “unwell”—nothing necessarily ver specific, but at it’s worst, I can feel incredibly anxious. Then, when I go to bed, I don’t fall deeply asleep, but instead it’s more like dozing, usually on and off. This makes me feel even worse, even that something’s wrong with my heart. But the very worst thing about all this? Every single time I forget that it happens whenever I have real coffee “too late”—yes, I forget it every single time.

To be fair to me, this problem it’s pretty rare, because I don’t ordinarily have a coffee after 2pm, bute especially because I usually now have only one cup of real coffee per day, and that’s first thing in the morning. It’s probably no wonder, then, that I keep forgetting about the consequences of having real coffee “too late” in the day.

However, the bigger issue is that I nvew used to have this problem at all until after I was nearing 60. What other fun changes are awaiting me on this ageing journey? I’ve “joked” in recent years that getting older is an ongoing series of new aches and pains in parts on the body we never realised could have aches and pains, that and foods that never bothered us now causing issues (literal or figurative…). This coffee thing is an example of the second type.

It may seem pointless to blog about something that I’m already dealing with as well as possible. For bloggers, sometimes (well, all the time for me…) some content is better than no content. However, the logevity of this blog means it has evolved into a repository of a whole bunch of my experiences and challenges, so I’m hoping that maybe by this will help me remember this issue the next time it comes up—though it probably won’t, of course.

This time, the only real thing it did to me, apart from making me feel bad at the time, was to leave me feeling utterly wiped out the next day. But, really, this is just another in a series of things to get used to. Getting old is weird.