Buckeye Mike

I have a confession to make. Brace yourself, you are probably never going to look at me the same way again. A deep dark secret that only my wife has known until recently, just saying the words brings more shame to me than you can possibly imagine. I mean what kind of person I must be to be hiding this. Worse yet, what kind of person does that? Ready? Here goes....... I have not been to the dentist since I was 9. (dramatic pause, I will wait for you to process that and try to re-focus) I remember the day well. The dentist was somewhere on Colerain Avenue in Cincinnati. From the light in my face to the dentist's hand in my mouth to the needle they stuck in the back of my jaw, I was not a big fan of that experience. And I never went back. Sure I thought about it in my twenties and thirties. I would hear other people talk about doing it. Like all the cool kids were get root canals and fillings, but stuck in my head was the memory of that smell and the mean dentist yelli...

For as long as I can remember, doing anything was a struggle. Between smoking and eating anything sweet that I could get my hands on for most of my adult life, I had put my body through the ringer without a second thought. I was never a physical specimen, even in high school. But by the time I hit 40, even taking the trash out was a chore. Any exercise would have been beyond imaginable. Somewhere along the path of "I need to lose weight in order to not be insulin dependent" it dawned on me that I have been presented with a golden opportunity. With the nicotine addiction a distant memory and the change in eating habits, suddenly I feel better and I have more energy. Maybe this could be more than a weight loss goal. Day before yesterday I was up and down 2 flights of stairs in a home a dozen times and realized I wasn't even a little winded. 2 nights ago, on my nightly walk, I pushed Little Red in her Wheelchair. Better than a mile on the truly rough terrain that Gah...