After twenty-four years of daily drinking, Ed Wyrick hit his bottom and tossed out his last bottle of vodka in August 2002. As a high school counselor in a rural county in the middle of the Bible belt, he feared for his job if he revealed his addiction, so he tried detoxing on his own. When he gave up and surrendered to a treatment center two weeks later, doctors said he was lucky to have survived. Three months after that, he quit smoking cigarettes. After eighteen months, he'd lost seventy pounds and was running five miles a day. Many years later, he remains free of alcohol, cigarettes, fat, and sloth. In My Reclaimed Life, Ed tells the story of how he changed his life, including the tools he uses to react to life's challenges without using alcohol, drugs, nicotine, or rocky road ice-cream. Early on, Ed read everything he could about defeating addictions and getting healthy. Even though he has an academic background, holding masters and doctoral degrees in counseling and psychology, books by scholars describing why he drank alcohol, smoked cigarettes, and ate too many chocolate chip cookies provided little help. Instead, he needed to know how to get better and found help by reading about real people's success stories. Now, he's paying it forward.
About the Author: In 2002, Ed Wyrick was fifty-one years old and everything looked great from the outside. Always among the first to arrive each morning at the high school where he worked as a counselor, he was well respected by his supervisors, colleagues, and the parents and students he served. In the previous twenty years, he had earned a doctorate at the University of Georgia; had two mystery novels published by St. Martin's Press that were well-reviewed by Playboy, major newspapers, and publishing magazines; had short stories published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and in literary magazines; was on the cover of Writer's Digest, a national magazine for aspiring writers; was a speaker at writers conferences; taught himself web design and developed and maintained websites for his school and others; and was a loving husband who raised three daughters as an active father attending school functions, soccer games, mock trial team competitions, and ballet recitals. In short, he was deemed a successful, talented, responsible, reliable, and intelligent professional family man. He was also an overweight active alcoholic, two-pack-a-day smoker with elevated blood pressure, a racing pulse rate, at least seventy pounds of excess fat, and triglycerides so high my LDL cholesterol levels (the bad kind) couldn't be calculated. His glucose levels were prediabetic. In the end, the massive amount of alcohol he consumed for three decades had screwed up his bone marrow, which began producing red blood cells with corpuscles way too big. Big red blood cells lead to dementia and death. In August 2002 he began a journey leading to sobriety, serenity, and physical fitness.