"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...

  3:17 AM. I know the exact time because I stared at it every single night for ten years. Not sometimes. Not occasionally. Every night. My eyes would snap open at 3:17, my heart already pounding, my brain already running through tomorrow's board meeting or next quarter's revenue forecast. I would lie there, staring at the ceiling, calculating numbers that didn't need calculating at three in the morning. During my years as a corporate executive, I slept four to five hours a night and called it discipline. My colleagues bragged about sleeping less. "I only need four hours," one senior VP used to say, like sleep deprivation was a competitive sport. We were all competing to see who could destroy themselves fastest. I was winning. Then I retired at 57. No more 6 AM conference calls. No more hoesik (회식) running until midnight. No more quarterly reports. And I still couldn't sleep. That's when I realized: the problem wasn't my schedule. The problem was that t...