How many warnings can life give us when something’s gone wrong?

By David McElroy · July 19, 2013

It wasn’t a big deal when I first noticed my ankles and feet swelling. I’m not sure if it started the middle of last week or over the weekend. It didn’t seem like a big enough deal to pay attention to at first.

But by Monday, the swelling was painful. My shoes felt as though they were about two sizes too small. It hurt to walk. I still didn’t think it was a big deal, but it was irritating enough by Wednesday to go visit a friend who’s a doctor. I just wanted him to tell me how to make the swelling go away.

My friend took a look at the swelling and pressed his thumb into part of the skin on each ankle and he timed how long it took the “pit” to go away. It was taking far longer than it should, he said, and that made it a “pitting edema.”

“Is it going to kill me?” I asked jokingly.

“Well, pitting edema is a classic sign of possible congestive heart failure,” he said. And he wasn’t joking.

For just a minute, I felt as though I was in another doctor’s office 18 months ago when a specialist told me that I had breast cancer and needed immediate surgery. For that minute, I relived what it felt like to experience the worry and loneliness I’d felt then. (I wrote about the experience of surgery this past January, on the one-year anniversary.) It felt as though someone was waving a red warning flag at me.

Over the next hour, I had various tests done. Heart trouble was quickly eliminated as a cause, but the feeling of serious warning stayed in my mind. Eventually, it was determined that I had an unusual infection of some kind, probably from bug bites. As I’d suspected from the beginning, it was no big deal. Still….

For several years now, I’ve been eating terribly. I wrote last year about my struggle with food, especially sugar. For me, eating the wrong things — and gaining weight — are purely psychological. I eat to fill emotional needs that I haven’t taken care of. It’s something that a lot of people understand, but if you’ve never experienced it, there’s no way it can seem like a big deal.

The oncologist told me last year that eating all of the sugar I was eating certainly didn’t cause the cancer, but he said there are indications that all that sugar provides an environment where cancers can grow more easily. Cancers seem to “like” sugar, he said.

As my doctor friend and I were talking Wednesday, we talked about the junk I’ve been eating. He didn’t lecture me, but he reminded me that what I was doing to my body were creating the right conditions for something bad to happen.

When I was diagnosed with cancer 18 months ago, I was scared. I hoped to be able to use the experience as a springboard to change some behaviors and find new ways to meet needs that weren’t getting met. It wasn’t long before I’d forgotten about that.

After the cancer was removed and I remained healthy, nothing in my life really changed. The same emotional needs remained unmet and I went right back to eating ice cream and cookies and so forth in disgusting quantities. The sugar leaves me feeling drugged, sluggish and drained of energy, but I keep doing it anyway — just like an alcoholic keeps going back to his bottle instead of dealing with his core problems.

When I thought briefly Wednesday that I might have a serious heart problem, I was scared. I’ve kept enough of that fear since then to be very sober in the way I look at my actions. I haven’t eaten any sugar since then. I feel better and have more energy, even though a part of me is still driven to eat the problematic sweet poison.

I find myself feeling that the cancer scare last year was a warning. This odd little incident that turned out not to be a big deal was another warning. Is life trying to warn me that I have to deal with the issues that lead me to overeat or else I’m going to face bigger problems?

It sounds silly to anthropomorphize “life” in this way, but something about it feels right. How many warnings does life give you to deal with issues that need to be dealt with? How long can you keep using a dangerous substitute instead of filling an emotional hole with what you really need?

The antibiotics I got for my infection are working. The swelling is going down and I can walk without pain. My shoes actually fit again. The only question I’m left with is whether I’m going to take this warning sign seriously or just ignore it and keep setting myself up for a serious problem in the future.

I’d like to say I’ll take it seriously, but I’m not sure what to actually do about it, so I really don’t know. And I don’t know how many warnings I get.

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Tyler Barnes will never be a basketball star. He probably peaked as a star high school player in Louisville, Ky. But for the last four years, he’s been a walk-on player for the University of Alabama. He’s a chemical engineering major with lots of academic honors who rides the bench because he loves being part of a team. He sometimes gets into games with a minute or two to go, but only if Alabama has a big lead. This Saturday, it was senior day for Alabama basketball, so it was his last chance to play in Coleman Coliseum. Alabama Coach Nate Oats says that one of the team starter’s came to him an hour before the game started — and fellow senior Alex Reese asked Oats if Barnes could start in his place for this one game. Even though the game was huge for Alabama, which is ranked No. 6 in the country and trying to wrap up an SEC title, Oats agreed. Barnes started and played the first three minutes, grabbing what was only the fourth rebound of his career and missing his only shot. Barnes has a great future as an engineer, but you’ll never again hear from him as a basketball player. For three shining minutes Saturday, though, he was a starter for a top-10 college basketball team — and his parents were in the stands from Kentucky to see it. There’s a lot of ugliness in college basketball right now, but this story makes me happy.

It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

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