Stay Healthy

I absolutely cannot stand going to the doctor. Any kind. And yet, here I am in the doctor’s office waiting to be seen. I don’t know why I’m such a baby about going. It could be that time when I was young and cut my leg just above the knee. My dad usually didn’t take us to the doctor because “butterfly bandages and hydrogen peroxide work just fine.” However, this time he got a serious look on his face and decided we better go in. He took me to a doctor that looked to me to be about 112 years old. I’m sure he was trained in the days of old time battlegrounds and bone saws because he just grabbed and poked and prodded, before proclaiming, “we better get this one cleaned out” He then proceeded to scrape and gouge and cut and poke with his medieval instruments of death before finally declaring the wound to be clean enough to sew back together. This whole time, my dad was holding me down and telling me to stop moving around so much or he'd give me something to cry about. If what the doctor was doing to me wasn't something to cry about, I wasn't interested to find out what was so I did my very best to stop moving and making noise. To his credit, the doctor did give me a shot of something for the pain, but it either wasn’t enough or he didn’t wait long enough for the medicine to start working before he started sewing the leg back together. Every time I would flinch, the doctor would get impatient with me and say something about how I shouldn’t be moving because my leg is numb. I wish he would have told my leg.

And then there's the time, not long ago, when I went to a dentist for a problem with one of my teeth. I was new to the area so I had never seen this one before. After I had waited for an eternity, in walked what looked like a 15 year old kid and introduced himself as my dentist. Whatever, Skippy. Are you going to have to stand on my chest to reach that tooth, or what? To his credit, he had no trouble dosing out plenty of painkiller before getting up on my chest to work on that bothersome tooth.

We all know the best way to avoid having to go to the doctor more often than not is to keep yourself as healthy as possible, starting with carefully choosing what we eat. So come down to the farmers markets where we have plenty of great choices for healthy eating and maybe, just maybe, we can cut down on some of those unpleasant visits.

Laney Walker Farmers Market - 1st Friday of every month, 4:30-7:00pm at 850 Laney Walker Blvd., Augusta, GA

Veggie Park Farmers Market - Every Thursday until November, 3:30-7:00pm at 631 Chafee Ave., Augusta, GA

A Farmers Market for Alex - The last Friday of every month, 11:00am-2:00pm at 451 E. Hill St., Thomson, GA