A Story About Work Life Balance

I first met Jerry* (I’ve changed his name to respect his privacy) at a local seminar I was presenting at for customers. I was about to handout the presentation when he walked in. He was about my height (5’10”) with short brown hair and was sporting the “nicest guy on earth” smile.

“Are you Nelson?”

“Oh, hey! You must be Jerry. Great to meet you…Welcome to the team!”

We shook hands.

“So where are you coming from?”

“Chicago.”

“That’s a heck of a trek to come all the way out here to LA, how do you like it so far?”

We chatted for a while and I could tell he was excited to join the team in a field sales role. I knew he was going to be a great teammate to work with. After the seminar was over, we discussed meeting for dinner to discuss business strategy. So we decided to meet a few days later at a local burger placed called “Father’s Office.”

So, a few days later, we’re sitting down at Father’s Office (a local bistro here in Los Angeles), eating arguably the best burger of our lives, talking about how intense a sales role could be.

To my surprise, he actually brushed off the remark. And then he dropped a bombshell on me.

“You’d be surprised Nelson, I’ve been through a lot.”

I tilted my head a bit, trying to process what he meant.

“What do you mean?”

“I actually flat-lined once.”

I looked at him blankly.

“What?”

“I literally flat lined in the hospital. Both my kidneys had failed.”

I stopped chewing. My eyes literally popped out my head.

You see, Jerry is no average Joe. He is an extraordinary human being. He is a man who has defied odds. He is an inspiration to all. And most importantly, he is a reminder to us all that we need to live each and every day fully.

Look, a dream job is great. But it’s not if you’re working 90 hours a week, neglecting your family and friends and feeling like death. You've got to have work life balance.

So take a step back. Breathe. Take a moment for yourself. Heck, take two moments. Relax.

And remember to cherish each and every day.

We’re given a limited time on earth and it’s important to enjoy and to appreciate what we’ve been given. His story reminds us why.

Here is his story in his words.

Blind

I wake up blind. I feel like my eyes are sewn shut. I can’t move my arms. You could not pay me a million dollars to move my arms. But I can feel that my arms are there.

That’s when I knew things had gone terribly wrong…

I screamed out for my mom.

******

The beginning

A single Mom raised me. I was the youngest of three brothers. My father had left my mother when I was very young. My mom worked her ass off, and had three jobs to clothe and feed us. She would clean houses, work at a tanning salon and work as a nursing assistant. Eventually she found a full time job as a toll road worker.

Anyway, recently, I had been living in Chicago and I was sitting with my friend Samantha and Steve Jobs had just passed. She showed me his video of his Stanford Commencement Speech. He talks about connecting the dots in life – he said, you can’t connect the dots looking forward and you can’t connect the dots looking backward. And I just saw LA as the next “dot.”

Something in my life wanted me to be fulfilled in Los Angeles. It could have been to meet someone, my career, at the end of the day, I can’t pinpoint it but I knew I was destined to be in LA. So I moved here.

Moving away from Chicago was hard. Not because of missing out on my friends. Not because of the change of scenery.

It was because it would be hard to leave my mother. That’s how close we are.

When I tell you my story…you’ll understand why.

******

Swollen Ankles

The day after high school prom, I woke up with my ankles completely swollen. To the point where I can’t even put on shoes. So, I began to think, I must have had an allergic reaction. So I take some Benadryl, thinking I was bit by something, but both ankles just keeps getting worse and worse!

They were huge and shaped like baseballs.

My mom took one look and said, “Oh my god, you were dancing all night, maybe you sprained it or something.”

So, we go to the doctor and immediately he wants to do a urine test.

It’s almost like he knew right away.

He does the urine test, and he comes back and says…

“Your kidneys are leaking. The protein is being leaked into your bloodstream.”

When your kidneys start to deteriorate that’s the first sign.

I was diagnosed with Nephrotic syndrome. It meant both my kidneys were diseased.

The good news was that it was treatable with prescription drugs.

The problem was that there was no cure.

I’d have to be on prescription drugs the rest of my life, since there was no cure. The problem was that it was only treatable with an oral steroid.

And that’s when my life changed.

It changed everything about me. At this point, I’m about to turn 18 and it made me gain weight incredibly fast. Hair began growing in places that never grew hair before, like my shoulders and my hands. It also gave me moonface – a symptom where my face was always swollen. It would also give me terrible zits too. Lastly, it would make me sensitive to light and it made my body ache. And this is something I never share with anyone. At this point, I was young, na?ve, stupid and could only think one thing.

I felt like a monster.

So I’m taking these pills every day for the rest of my life and living with these side effects. I felt dead inside as a person.

So I made up my mind that I had only one route left to take.

To let go.

A Phone Call That Changed My Life

So I go to Walgreens, and decide the way I’m going to end my life is by taking a bunch of sleeping pills. For some reason, I wanted to save $2 so I bought 60 of the generic branded sleeping pills. I thought I would take them, go to bed and it would be that easy. I remember listening to this Blink 182 song called “Adam’s Song,” and there was this line, “Please tell mom this is not her fault.” So on a piece of paper, I wrote, “Mom, this is not your fault, I love you.” I needed her to know it didn’t have anything to do with her.

I head home. I take out the pills from the box and put them into my hand.

I’m about to take the pills.

I go to a get a glass of water and I’m just shaking.

And shaking.

And then all of a sudden…

The phone rings. My best friend Danny is on the line.

“Do you want to go see a movie or something?”

“You know I don’t want to go out in public.”

“Don’t you get it, nobody cares what you look like out in public. You’re still Jerry. We’re your friends. We love you. By the way man, you don’t sound too good.”

“I just had a really bad day.”

“Do you want me to come over and we’ll just play that tennis game on your Nintendo 64?”

I paused.

“Yeah, I do.”

He comes over and that whole night we sit there and play video games, and we’re laughing and joking. And it sound so silly, but that idea of being young kicked the idea of suicide out of my head. I found comfort in that he didn’t care about how I looked and didn’t judge me.

So I never ended up taking the sleeping pills.

I’ve never told anyone this part of the story. But I want to now because I don’t want people to give up hope.

Anyway, later on, I decided I’m just going to go off the meds instead.

I did it because when I was on the meds, I wasn’t even myself anymore. I used to be this young, vibrant kid. And after the meds, I wouldn’t even go outside and I lost all my friends. Not because they were mean to me - nobody ever picked on me. But I just felt so ugly to the world. My friends tried to support me but I never let them in. I refused to let them in even though they reached out to me. My best friend Danny was the only person I spoke to about this that I would let see me. I felt comfortable with him.

I had been taking the meds for a year and I started to think that maybe I was cured. I decide to take myself off the medicine. My mom was always very strict about it so I knew I had to be really smart about it. I knew I had to take 4 pills a day so I would make sure I got my refills on time. She started to notice however, that my hair, my puffy face and zits started going away. She was like, what’s going on? And I would say, oh, they lowered my dosage and my body is getting used to it. Everything appeared normal on the outside but I was killing my kidneys on the inside. I went on like this for 2 years in college.

During this time, I don’t always feel good and I would get tired every now and then.

All of a sudden, my vision starts to get blurry and I start to get terrible headaches. This went on for weeks. And each day it’s just getting a little worse. I had just bought a new computer and I thought I was just staring at the computer for too long. I began taking Tylenol to combat the headaches. I did that until one day, I woke up and it’s pitch black.

I couldn’t open my eyes. They felt like they were sewn shut. And I couldn’t move my arms…I just yelled for my mom. “Mom! I can’t see…I can’t see!”

I was rushed to the emergency room.

******

The next thing you know, I wake up and my dad’s hand is on mine.

I’m in a cold hospital bed.

This was the first time I saw my dad in about 6 years. You see, I grew up resenting my dad. At one point I had written him off in my life. After all, I felt like he deserted us. But when I woke up in that hospital with his hand on mine, all that resentment went away. I felt so infantile, I felt so helpless and just to have my father there by my side, holding my hand was comforting. My instincts kicked in.

Anyway, they took my blood pressure, which was around 240 over 120 and they rush me into urgent care. My blood pressure, because my kidneys had failed, had gotten so high, that the blood vessels had popped and that’s why I couldn’t see. There was literally blood filling in my eye. My eyes were open but I couldn’t see because of the blood. I could have become irreversibly blind if I had waited longer. Luckily they were able to fix it.

Since my kidneys were now failing, this meant I needed to start kidney dialysis right away. What is dialysis? It’s living torture. I’m immediately rushed into surgery and a catheter is inserted into my chest. I still have scar of a hole on my chest. Think of it this way, two tubes are sticking out of my chest into this dialysis machine. Patients on long term dialysis have a fistula inserted into their arms. There was this huge circle thing literally inside my arm. Also, after surgery, I was told that the device in my shoulder was highly infectious, so I would have to be careful not to get water onto the area. As you can imagine, this made small tasks that we take for granted every day, like bathing, incredibly hard.

Living Torture

Dialysis is three days a week. I sit in a chair, I get hooked up to this machine and the tubes are hooked up to the sheet. My blood circulates through the machine and it cleans my blood. It’s basically what your kidney does – it removes toxins from your blood.

I couldn’t go to sleep during the procedure because right next to me the machines would be beeping.

I would lose 10 lbs. in four hours in this process and I would feel just exhausted afterwards. After the procedure finished, my body would lose so much weight and my blood pressure would drop dramatically and when that happened, I would faint. It’s crazy.

This would happen every single time.

One night, when I was laying in bed in the emergency room, all of a sudden, my head was spinning, almost like Alice in Wonderland.

I ended up completely falling out of the bed and crashing into the ground. It was an out of body experience, and I saw the light. It felt like I was floating away from my body. I could hear people shouting in the background.

I flat lined.

I woke up feeling terrible. But I woke up. And that was all that mattered. That was my near death experience.

I ended up doing dialysis for 11 months.

The diagnosis is that I need a kidney transplant. And until I get one, I would have to be on dialysis. When I heard that…

My heart just sank.

There’s no timeline for how long I could live. I could live for 1 year on dialysis and die, or be on it for 40 years and then die. Either way, it had become my life.

There are two ways to get a new kidney.

1. Go on a waiting list for a kidney.

2. Have someone who’s willing to donate his kidney to me.

I had to find a donor. They told me that one of my parents will have a matching blood type (it’s through genetics) and they can donate to me.

My mom matched me.

But there was a catch. My doctors told her she couldn’t do it. Before you can donate your kidney, you have to meet certain criteria, which she wasn’t able to meet. They told her they couldn’t do it because of the liability. She was devastated.

My family was super supportive during this time. About month 9, even my friends began to volunteer to see if they could donate a kidney. I never asked anyone, because I never wanted to give anyone that burden. It turns out one of my friends is a match.

But in order for him to donate his kidney, he had to pass three tests:

1. The volunteer has to match 3 out of 6 genetic markers so that my body won’t reject his kidney. He matches 3.

2. The second test is basically a physical to make sure he’s healthy. He passes.

3. The third test is a psychological test. He fails. They basically said he was not ready to donate his kidney.

And that was it. He calls me and I was excited to pick up his call because he was my savior.

Instead, I just heard him say, “I can’t do it. They won’t let me do it.”

I drop the phone. It crashes to the floor, along with my hopes.

The hospital puts me on a transplant list. One day I come home and my mom is crying, holding a letter. The letter is from the hospital. It says I’m now on a transplant list.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Unexpected News

I told her about how my friend didn’t pass the donor test. I told her I didn’t want to tell her because I knew it would break her heart. That same night, she goes to Bally’s to go run. This is her personal way of coping – running. She’s on the treadmill and she starts to cry. A complete stranger goes up to her.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, just disregard it please.”

The stranger walks away.

She comes back.

“I’m sorry, this is going to sound crazy, but something told me to come over here to figure out what’s wrong with you.”

“Well, if you must know, my son is very sick and things aren’t looking very good for him now.”

“What is he sick with?"

“His kidneys are failing.”

“How does he get better?”

“He needs a kidney transplant. We need someone with O positive blood to donate.”

“I’m O positive. I’ll donate my kidney.”

You can imagine the reaction of my mom.

A complete stranger, named Anne*, is offering to donate her kidney to save my life.

She goes to get tested.

The first test is around matching genetic markers - 6 out of 6 match! She was a perfect match.

The second test is a physical. She passes with flying colors!

The third test is a psychological test…

She passes.

There was only one issue.

She was older in age and the cut off for the age to have surgery performed is 55. The doctor didn’t want to operate on someone who was frail.

Guess what her age was?

She was two weeks from turning 55.

We do the surgery.

I wake up and I feel like a million bucks. My body is instantly working. It feels like I’ve been born again.

I owe my life to her. She’s my angel. We call each other kidney twins. She’s part of my family now. We have her over for Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners now.

It changed my life. It changed everything. It strengthened every relationship I had. It inspired me to cherish every day. To appreciate family. To appreciate friends. To appreciate the opportunity I’ve been given.

A lot of days now, if it’s sunny outside, that’s enough for me.

I was speechless. I’ve heard many inspiring stories in my life, but to hear such an incredible story of giving completely swept me away. Throughout the night, I heard myself repeatedly telling Jerry how amazing his life story was. He asked me to leave you all with this message:

Enjoy each and every day. We are all truly blessed to be living. Soak up the sun. Take a walk. Breathe in the fresh air.

And appreciate it.

All too often we get caught up in the journey. The chase. The work.

Just remember to take a moment to breathe. To reflect. To enjoy. You’ll be much happier and more productive if you take moments for yourself.