medication. Unfortunately, the damage to my kidneys had already been done. And so they stayed stabilized for a couple of years. They didn’t get better, but they didn’t get worse.”

But in October 2019 when she again left for Kenya to complete her doctorate that Carter took a turn for the worse and felt ill all throughout her Kenya trip. When she came back home, she still felt ill. And then a crisis occurred.

“When we all sheltered in place in March 2020 due to the pandemic, I thought wrongly, ‘This will probably improve my kidney health because I don’t have to get up and go to work every day,’” Carter said. “’I’m working from home.’ But it actually didn’t. It worsened my condition and it worsened it rapidly. I didn’t realize how staying active was helpful to my overall health. So when I was at home and stationary — I didn’t do much except walk around outside — my kidneys worsened quite rapidly. And then in May 2020, I had kidney failure, complete kidney failure. I wasn’t in any pain. I just woke up and I was disoriented.”

Carter checked herself into the hospital and was cut off from almost everyone because her cell phone wasn’t working. She did get one call in to her son. But otherwise, it was just Carter and her doctors.

“Basically they told me I had gone into kidney failure,” Carter recalled. “And they needed to do an emergency dialysis or I would die. Later on I found out one of my friends was saying she was worried I wasn’t going to accept it because they had wanted me to go on dialysis years before. And I was fighting to live a different kind of life. I said when it was an either or situation — which is basically what it was — I can make the decision, ‘Yeah, let me have this dialysis.’”

Carter underwent dialysis at the hospital. And while her nephrologist reminded her that this would happen if she didn’t go on dialysis, Carter sought to get him to understand the cultural differences and how they impact ones approach to medicine.

“I tried to explain to him that he didn’t understand my African American sensibility,” Carter said. “I do everything I can to live and to live well. And if that doesn’t work, then I try another option. That’s how I thought. Medicine in the U.S. really is about intervention and not prevention. If I had it to do over again, I wish I had known about the Nettles Tea earlier because I could have gone on a vegetarian diet, which would have helped my kidneys a lot. I since found out that another famous African American woman, Madame C.J. Walker, had kidney disease. I was watching her documentary once. And the doctor told her, ‘I need you to go on a vegetarian diet. Stop eating meat.’ When you kidneys are under distress, the added protein is hard for them. That was his suggestion to her. I thought, ‘Hmmm, nobody ever suggested to me when I was first diagnosed with diabetes that the way to avoid kidney disease, they told me about losing weight, but they didn’t tell me to try a vegetarian diet or going meatless. I think part of what happened for me with kidney disease is learning to forgive myself and to work with myself. I could have made some different choices about the foods I ate and the exercise that I did or didn’t do. I’ve always been a sedentary person. Since I was a little girl, I was a reader or a writer. So I started being more attentive when they told me to take a certain medication and told me the side effects. ‘It damages your kidneys.’ It’s important to me that people in the community know because that high rate of diabetes among people of color is that you really need to control the diabetes and really work well with the diabetes. Looking back, I thought that I was initially diagnosed, ‘This is terrible’ because I had never had any major health issues before. For where I am now, diabetes is a small thing compared to having kidney disease.”

While Carter received her first dialysis treatment at the hospital and then continued with a three times per week in-person treatment at a kidney clinic, she switched to peritoneal dialysis, an in-home treatment that is basically self-administered.

“I have a machine that I hook up to as I sleep,” Carter said. “It’s through a lining in the stomach. The solution comes in and drains out and it acts like the kidney filter. With PD, you have to make sure that you are comfortable doing it on your own. Number two, you have to make sure that everything is sanitized and clean. Some of my family members — I’m not the only one in my family who has had kidney disease. My father and a beloved cousin had kidney disease — were very helpful in telling me what I could do. I could hook up to the machine and go to sleep, which is essentially what happens for me. But they were concerned because if you aren’t really clean and are careful about your environment, you can get an infection. No one wants to do that. So, I just felt it was better for my life to do the PD.”

Carter has been preaching to the African American community and beyond about taking good care of one’s health.

“I told everyone in my church, and everyone in my exercise class who have shared that they have been diagnosed with diabetes,” Carter said. “Be careful and monitor your kidneys. Do what you need to do to lose weight. Make sure it is well-controlled because it can get worse.”

Carter is waiting for a kidney transplant. She is basically waiting to live.

***

Antwon Cripps was a biracial Madison who grew up in the Simpson Street area until his mom moved to a farm in McFarland to create distance between Cripps and the street life. Cripps had a pretty nondescript life. He got a degree in auto-diesel technology, got a job at a car dealership for a year and then returned to Madison. He had his son when he was 21-years-old and owned a roofing business for about 10 years before taking a job making deliveries for Schoepp’s Ice Cream. And then his health took a sudden turn for the worse.

“To say the least, the kidney failure was something that happened out of the blue,” Cripps said. “I delivered ice cream — I drove a Class D Straight Truck — to all of the water parks in the Wisconsin Dells. I delivered to Mt/ Olympus and Noah’s Ark. I would deliver to all of these water parks and after I would get done, I would get so sick from overworking. I would just throw up behind my truck. That happened for about a year where I was just throwing up after almost every stop. Being the tough guy that I thought I was, a young kid thinking nothing could phase me. I thought I was drinking too much or nor eating right. One day, I was headed up to Richland Center to deliver some ice cream and I passed out in my truck going down Highway 12. I woke up with my truck in neutral idling on the side of the road, thank God. I don’t know how that happened. I was all dizzy and what not. I drove myself to the emergency room in Richland Center. They did a couple of tests on me and found out I had a whole lot of blood in my urine and found out a couple of days later that my kidney function was at 23 percent and I probably was going through kidney failure throughout my 20s and didn’t really realize it.”

Fortunately for Cripps, his mother was willing to donate a kidney and she was a match and Cripps received the transplant after being on dialysis for only three months.

“Four years later, I had a car accident,” Cripps said. “I got rear-ended and the kidney went down from there. That was in 2012. In 2012, I had graduated from MATC when I was in my 30s with a liberal arts degree. And then I took five years off because I had a second child. I waited until he got into kindergarten and the whole time, I was on dialysis. I was struggling. In 2016, I decided to go to Whitewater. I was on dialysis when I started school. And I literally drove to Whitewater three days a week from Madison while doing dialysis.”

Losing his first transplanted kidney was devastating to Cripps.

“My new baby’s momma worked really hard to pull me out of it,” Cripps said about the depression he experienced after losing his first kidney transplant. “Unfortunately I lost that relationship just because of the struggles of losing the first kidney when I was rear-ended. It just jolted my kidney and it slowly faded over the next six months. That was probably the most horrible thing because I realized I would have to go back on dialysis. I was on dialysis for three years. I went to the dialysis center for the first three months. I kept seeing the same people who had the same routine. There was a 12-year-old girl who was getting it. I really couldn’t deal with the pain of watching someone else go through it who was so young. And so I opted to do home dialysis. I was the 87^th person in Wisconsin to do home dialysis. I did it through tubes that I had in my chest. I did that for two years and the better part of three. I had hit rock bottom. I was in a depressed state. I was, in some cases, suicidal.

Cripps received more than an education while he was at UW-Whitewater.

“I was at UW-Whitewater in class and I got a call from the transplant coordinator saying, ‘I have a kidney,’” Cripps recalled. “’Do you want to get it done tomorrow?’ I was like, ‘You know it!’ So I ended up withdrawing from one of my classes from that semester. But I was back at class three weeks later with a new kidney and finishing school out in May 2019. My second transplant from December 2016 has been amazing. I’ve never felt better in my life actually. The doctor told me my kidneys were failing all during my 20s. Then I never knew what actual health was until after the second kidney transplant.”

For Cripps, it was a second lease on life.

“When I pulled myself out of that and had the second kidney transplant, I knew better,” Cripps said. “I knew how to take care of it. I knew that the kidney would take care of me. I knew this was a better life than trying to worry about the struggles and the little things like taking the pills. That was nothing compared to living and not having to be hooked up to the machine 4-6 hours per day, feeling like I could wake up and have energy. For me, there are three things that have been miracles in my life: Both of my kids and my second kidney.”

Cripps is no longer waiting to live. He is living the life that God — and his kidney donor — has given him.

All three people impacted by or waiting for kidney transplants urge the readers of The Capital City Hues to consider organ donations so that others can live. Life is so very precious. Pass it along.