David CookView other columns by David Cook
On a pleasant fall afternoon in 2011, Charles Adamson, a local builder, dropped by his ex-wife’s Cleveland, Tenn., home to pick up their daughter Lauren for an afternoon together.
Suddenly, he felt dizzy. He crashed face-first to the floor, so sick he thought he was dying. His ex-wife and daughter rushed him to the ER, where doctors would soon deliver the news.
Kidney failure.
“Had they gotten me there any later, I would have been in a coma or dead,” Charles said.
For Charles, now 44, his collapse turned into a sort of midlife crisis, forcing him to change the way he saw himself, and the world. He changed his diet. His outlook. He kept working, or trying to. (“Don’t lay down and die,” he told himself.)