Ed, stone cold sober, dancing with
his daughter in 2009 - a miracle!
I was also an overweight active alcoholic, two-pack-a-day smoker
with elevated blood pressure, a racing pulse rate, and triglycerides
so high that my cholesterol levels could not be accurately calculated.
Walking up the street was a challenge.
Driver's License - 2001
On July 4, 2007 I was nearly
five years away my last drink of alcohol and my last cigarette.
I was seventy pounds lighter and had been that way for over
two years. My blood pressure was normal and my resting heart
rate was in the low forties. Without medication, my triglycerides
were in the seventies, LDL cholesterol was in the sixties and
HDL cholesterol was in the upper fifties. In case you don’t
know it, those are terrific numbers. On that day in July, I
ran the 6.2 miles of the Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta in fifty-one
minutes and seventeen seconds. That time put me in three thousand
and eighth place in the 55,000 person race. That result was
just fine with me. A sense of pride and accomplishment had replaced
the fear and self-loathing that was consuming me.
A week later, I was in Dr. Farris Johnson’s office. He
became my general practitioner after I fired my previous doctor
a few weeks after my last drink of alcohol because I discovered
he was an incompetent idiot. I was telling Farris about my results
in the race. Knowing I had books published before, he said,
“You ought to write about that.”
“The race?”
“About getting better—alcohol, cigarettes, weight,
cholesterol, health—everything.”
OK, I've done it. It took a while for me to write the book that
is the basis of this website, though. My writing had become
tied to my drinking and doing it again was hard. For a while,
I had to work on it one paragraph at a time. Eventually, like
every thing else in my life during the recent years, it got
better.
The book's just sitting there, a cartharsis for me. Meanwhile,
I hope this website is helpful. |
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