Purple Legs

While on a coffee break outside, my coworker Craig and I saw this strange looking fat man with one of those walkers with wheels on it. The man was sitting on the platform of his walker, smoking a cigarette, parked in a spot where many people had to go by him. He ogled all the women walking past, without exception. Young, old, fat, thin – it didn’t seem to matter.

The man was comical and sad, if you looked at him in a cruel way. Bald, maybe in his late 40s, he had a troll-like shape. If you put him in a furry loin cloth and gave him a club, made him ten feet tall, he’d fit right in on the cover of some fantasy novel.

When he got up, and started walking towards us, I noticed his lower legs were dark purple and his feet were turning white. It looked like his legs were rotting, gangrenous, possibly from diabetes. Craig and I were horrified.

“I thought he was wearing socks,” Craig said, “when we were seeing him from a distance.”

I’d noticed scabs on his legs, but the discoloration wasn’t obvious until he got close up.

You hear about these things. Doctors tell their patients, “You need to change your diet and stop smoking or you’re going to suffer terrible complications from your diabetes.”

And the patient says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and doesn’t do anything different. They go blind. They lose fingers. They have their feet amputated. They slowly rot away to nothing as all their veins clog up with sugar crystals.

Here was a man in the midst of all that. His legs were literally dying out from under him. And he just continued doing the same old things he had always done. It strikes me as a slow-motion form of suicide. He doesn’t really want to live, but he doesn’t really want to die. If eating the same crappy diet and smoking the same amount of cigarettes kills him, then, oh well. Everybody has to die some time. That’s life.

There’s some sort of powerful denial at work – even as he sees his own legs change colour and he loses all sensation down there.

“This isn’t happening.”

Then, later, “This is happening, but it’s no big deal.”

Maybe brief flashes of horror and understanding. “I’m doing this to myself. I’m weak. I’m a loser.”

He beats himself up until he can’t handle it any more. Until he’s numb. Back into weakly denying reality.

Even after he has to have his legs amputated, and he wakes up from the surgery, he’ll probably think to himself:

“Now I’m a cripple. This is terrible. Why do these things happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?”

He never owns his life. He never takes responsibility for it. It wasn’t his diet. It wasn’t refusing to change. It’s always bad luck, life, just the way it is, God punishing him. Some external force, attacking.

He never understands his real situation. Never understands that it was always an internal force, deep within him, that could never wake up, take charge, make changes.

Or maybe none of this is true. It’s quite possible he didn’t have diabetes and his medical condition was something else entirely. Who knows?