CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE

I'm now getting by on two doses a day: a cup of coffee in the morning and a Coke in the afternoon.

My doctor wants me to become decaffeinated.

She's a nice woman, really, but I wonder if she knows what she's asking.

We won't go into the health reasons here (my blood pressure is just fine, thank you, or at least it was before I was told to give up my drug of choice), but caffeine is making an annoying situation more annoying.

The problem is the cure may kill me. Frankly, I'm not sure I want to live like this.

Giving up caffeine isn't as easy as it sounds. I have headaches. I can't wake up. I can't even think in complete sentences, much less speak in them. And I'm even crabbier than usual.

People who know me are very frightened right about now.

And they should be.

I didn't know I was addicted.

I know, I know: By the time you know you're addicted, you're an addict. And who knew three cups of coffee and two regular Cokes a day could be habit forming?

I don't think there's a 12-step program for caffeine addicts, but someone should start one. We could have herbal tea and doughnuts at the meetings.

Maybe cappuccino-colored patches that deliver little jolts of the stuff throughout the day.

Doctors worry too much caffeine makes their patients hyper, speeding up the heart and jolting the blood pressure up a few points.

Caffeine did not make me jumpy. Caffeine made me have a pulse. Not having caffeine is making me jumpy, and more than a little incoherent, as some of you may have noticed by now.

I think I'm going through withdrawal.

Any minute now, I'm going to see giant spiders coming out of the wall, clutching big mugs of steaming hot black coffee in all eight legs.

The spiders will look much calmer than I do. After all, they have caffeine.

People who make coffee commercials will try to convince you that decaf coffee tastes the same as the real thing.

They're wrong. And let's face it, the two best things about coffee are the aroma and the buzz you get from all that caffeine.

If you want flavor add cream and sugar. Maybe a little of that hazelnut flavoring.

Or drink hot chocolate, which also has caffeine, but not as much as coffee.

And how cool is it to order a decaf espresso? You might as well just suck the coffee grounds through a soggy filter.

Caffeine, as I've had cause to learn, is everywhere.

There's coffee-flavored ice cream and yogurt and frozen yogurt, all of which have caffeine.

Some soft drinks boast of adding lots of caffeine. And you can buy bottled water with caffeine added.

Apparently fluoride wasn't enough.

I'm now getting by on two doses a day: a cup of coffee in the morning and a Coke in the afternoon.

Not the diet kind. The kind with real, honest-to-goodness refined sugar for an added shock to the system.

I find myself watching the clock in the afternoons, anxiously awaiting the trip to the vending machine. Sometimes I find myself sweating.

Kind of gives you a whole new perspective on coffee breaks.

My buddy Sondra tells me the cravings will last about a month. I'm not sure I can hold out that long.

Maybe I could just arm-wrestle the spiders... .

Peggy O'Farrell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.