Mistress Coffee

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It's Saturday and it's a day I have allowed myself to cheat.

As a Crohn's patient, we know there are certain things that we shouldn't eat.  We become very in-tune with our system and know basically how much of a trigger food is needed before it causes a flare-up.

I have two never-fail trigger foods:  fries and coffee.

I can do without the fries.  I like them, of course.  Who doesn't?  But I don't need fries.  If I never have another fry in my life, I would be okay with that. 

Unfortunatley, I cannot say the same thing about coffee.

I don't know what it is about coffee and crohn's, but I assume its the caffeine.  I used to drink a lot of coffee.  Before Crohn's, there was a time in my early teaching career when I would drink basically a pot of coffee, ten cups of so, in a morning.  Then I started suffering from palpitations.  Then I cut down the coffee.

Lately, before the most recent flare-up last Fall, I was drinking about four cups a morning every day.  That was my limit.  Anything over that and I would find myself spending more time in the bathroom.  Then I started seeing my Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor and was told that coffee "adds heat" to the colon and should be avoided.  It's not only the caffeine, I was told.  Coffee in general is not good for the colon, according to the Chinese.  Drink tea instead, he told me.

But tea is not the same thing.  I don't mind tea but it doesn't have the aroma or the bite of coffee.  It doesn't open my eyes in the morning and remove the fog.

In fact, I have come to realize that coffee may be the greatest thing discovered by man.

Over the last couple of months, I have given up coffee, beer and wine---among other things.  If you would have asked me a couple of months ago which of those three I would miss the most, I would have said wine.  I like a nice glass of wine for dinner.  When my wife and I play scrabble like an old married couple, I like a glass of wine.  I like to sip wine by the fire out on the deck.

But now, I would say coffee.  I miss it in the morning.  I have tried coffee substitutes, but frankly they don't come close to coffee.  I can tolerate Teechino.  The "Mocha" blend is quite good, actually.  But it is not coffee.  It looks like coffee, it tastes vaguely like coffee.  But it does not smell like coffee.  At work, in the morning, everyone is walking around with coffee cups and the aroma is in every office you walk into. When I see a colleague walking down the hall with a Dunkin' Donuts cup, I want to knock him down and snatch it. 

So, instead of becoming someone who assaults others for what they have, I have decided to cheat.

I am feeling better, that is for sure.  How much can coffee hurt?  I know if I drink a lot of coffee, I will be feeling it.  Before the flare-up, if I had more than 4 cups I would notice the difference.  Now, I limit myself to two cups, just on the weekends.

Right now, as I type these words, my boys are in the other room watching Phineas and Ferb and I have the morning paper spread out in front of me.  The aroma of coffee is wafting through the kitchen.

Life is good.

The blend is 1/2 decaf.  So, I cut out a good portion of the caffeine, the main culprit.  And it works for me.  No difference in my system.  I don't dare go over this amount, however.  As I mentioned, we crohnies sure know our bodies.

So, I have become a cheater.  And my mistress is coffee.

Just please don't tell Dr. X.