"Choco Papa`s Health Note"

                        Every morning, I walk down the stairs from my apartment. Fourteen steps. And every morning, my knees announce each one. Click. Pop. Crack. Click. Pop. Crack. My wife says she can hear me coming from the bedroom. She doesn't need an alarm clock. She has my knees. I'm 59 years old, but my knees are at least 60. Probably 65. They've lived a harder life than the rest of me. While my brain was sitting in boardrooms and my hands were signing contracts, my knees were still paying the bill for what I did to them in my twenties. Let me do the math. In my professional baseball career, I estimate I slid into bases roughly 2,000 times. Each slide slammed my knees into packed dirt at full sprint speed. I squatted behind home plate for catching drills thousands of times — deep squats, full body weight, for hours. I sprinted from first to third, stopped hard, pivoted, pushed off. Over and over. Season after season. Tha...

145/95. Two numbers. That's all it took to scare me more than any fastball I ever faced in professional baseball. I was 55 years old, sitting in a plastic chair at my annual health checkup (건강검진, geongang-geomjin), watching the nurse unwrap the blood pressure cuff from my arm. She wrote the numbers on my chart without expression. No alarm. No warning. Just two numbers and a quiet "the doctor will discuss this with you." When the doctor came in, he didn't waste time. He pointed at my chart and said: "145 over 95. Stage 2 hypertension. How long has it been like this?" I had no idea. I hadn't checked my blood pressure in three years. Maybe five. "Do you feel any symptoms?" he asked. Nothing. No headaches. No dizziness. No chest pain. I felt completely normal. I'd had lunch with a client two hours earlier — samgyeopsal (삼겹살), two bowls of rice, soybean paste stew. A normal Tuesday. He looked at me and said something that still echoes in my head...