"Choco Papa`s Health Note"

  The Quietest Thing Diabetes Took From Me — Four Years Without Feeling the Ground  A Twenties Lived on Dirt Every morning, these feet lift me out of bed. My twenties were lived on dirt. Ballpark dirt. Dirt jammed into my cleats. Dirt that ended up in my mouth after a slide into second base. After every game, when I peeled off my socks in the locker room, my feet were either red or black or both. I lost toenails more times than I can count. Blisters were a daily condition. Back then, I thought sore feet were just how it was. A baseball player's feet were supposed to hurt. That's what I told myself. Looking back, I never once thanked my feet during those years. They carried me to first base, to second, to home. And I never said sorry to them either.   For thirty years, my feet lived inside these. Thirty Years Inside Dress Shoes When I left baseball, I joined a company. From that day, for the next thirty years, my feet lived inside dress shoes. I put them on before dawn and...

  The Conversation I Couldn't Follow It happened at a restaurant. Six of us around a table — old colleagues, the kind of dinner I'd started going to once a month after retirement. The restaurant was noisy. Music playing. Other tables laughing. The usual background chaos of a Friday evening in Seoul. The man sitting across from me was telling a story. Everyone was laughing. I smiled and nodded, but I hadn't caught a single word. Not because I wasn't paying attention — I was straining to hear him. His mouth was moving, the sounds were reaching me, but the words were muddy, like listening to someone talk through a wall. I leaned forward. Still couldn't make it out. I turned my head slightly, angling my right ear toward him. Better, but not enough. Finally, I did what I'd been doing more and more often: I waited for someone else to respond, then guessed what had been said from context. Nobody noticed. I'd gotten very good at faking it. On the drive hom...

    The First Drink I Remember I was twenty-six, a rookie in a big company, sitting at a barbecue restaurant with my team after my first week of work. My boss poured me a glass of soju, looked me in the eye, and said: "In this company, we drink together. That's how you become family." I drank it. Then another. Then another. By midnight, I was stumbling into a taxi, and by the next morning, I was sitting at my desk with a headache pretending everything was fine. My senior colleague leaned over and whispered: "Good. You survived your first dinner. There will be hundreds more." He was right. There were hundreds more. Maybe thousands. Over thirty years of working life, drinking wasn't a choice — it was infrastructure. It was how deals were discussed, how relationships were built, how stress was managed, how promotions were celebrated, how failures were mourned. Soju, beer, whiskey, wine — the drink changed depending on the occasion, but the ritual never di...

  The Word That Connected Everything For years, I treated my health problems as separate issues. High blood pressure — that's a heart problem. Belly fat — that's a diet problem. Joint pain — that's an aging problem. Liver enzymes — that's a drinking problem. Bleeding gums — that's a dental problem. Poor sleep — that's a stress problem. Each one had its own doctor, its own explanation, its own treatment. I was collecting diagnoses like stamps, and nobody — not one doctor across five different specialties — ever sat me down and said: "These aren't separate problems. They're all connected. And the connection is inflammation." I had to figure that out myself. At fifty-seven, after two years of reading, testing, and paying attention to my own body, I finally understood the one word that tied everything together. Inflammation. Not the kind you can see — not a swollen ankle or a red cut. The other kind. The invisible, chronic, low-grade fire tha...