To spill, or not to spill

I had known I had a tremor before but I did not choose to do anything about it until it started to impact me in a way that others would notice. I guess some might have noticed me before this, but I could still believe that they would not be sure they had really seen what I could feel happening. It all started at Starbucks.

“Do you want room for cream in that?”

Of course not; if they leave room for cream, they are cheating you out of coffee you have paid for. Anyway, if you ask for room for cream they always leave too much room for me. I just like a splash of it for flavor. And nine times out of ten, they still leave enough room for cream even when you say not to. That tenth time in this case, is the one that got me.

My barista (it is hard to think of them as baristas when they are filling a paper cup with coffee from Starbucks) filled my cup, and snapped the “to-go” lid on. I took it over to the sugar and cream station and removed the lid. My coffee about spilled over even sitting on the table there, it was so full. I thought to myself, ‘I will just pick this up real quick and drink it down a gulp or two so I can put some half-and-half in.’ And there would have been a time in my past that this would have been the thing to do. But, now was not that time.

I had raised the cup up halfway and it was already about out of my control. I stared at my hand willing it to be still, knowing it would not, but still unable to continue raising it, or lowering it back to the table. The shake got worse. It is funny that I should have known this would happen with a paper cup. It always does to some extent. If it had been a porcelain mug, the extra weight would have made it a steadier task. But these paper cups are just the right weight to set up a tremor, and I knew that. Why didn’t I think to steady my right hand with the left? It is a strange thing that putting two shaky hands together for me anyway, still works to steady things down a bit. But, how would that look? In some ways, using my left hand as a stabilizer would have been admitting that I had a problem. Yes, it would be much better to just stand there with cup half way to my mouth. By then, it was too late to do anything anyway. The coffee was splattering over my hand by then.
My first thought was that this stuff was way too hot to have tried to sip down to a more manageable level anyway. It was better to burn my hand a bit than to have to nurse a burned tongue for a few days. And it had the same effect as having drunk the coffee to a manageable level in the cup.

Now the worry was how many people witnessed my accidental spill? Where did Starbucks put the napkins again? It always seems like they hide them. OK, just sop up the spill, and move on. Of course I am shaking even more now with the added stress. People are around me waiting for me to move out of their way. No one wants to rush the poor old shaking man who just spilled coffee on his hand.

I have tried to be better about these types of events since then. Of course, now I am on Propranolol so that limits my shake to a degree. And, I am trying to be less caring about what others may see when they look at me. Maybe they understand. Maybe they do not. Maybe they have something they are sensitive about also, and they are not even looking at me lest I notice what they are attempting to hide. Maybe next time they ask me if they should leave room for cream, I will just say, “yes- leave a bit of room.”