Good Will is hunting.

I've never actually met Will. We Zoomed once. He had just gotten back from the hospital and he was wiped out. That's because he's on dialysis. See, Will is in desperate need of a kidney. Without dialysis, he would die. But even though he's alive, he's not really living. 

This is Will's story, and I'm hoping by the end of it you might be able to help him. 

As many of you know, I have developed a passion to help people in need of a kidney who can't find a donor. I gave mine to a man named Ken that I never met. I don't say that in a prideful way, but in the if-I-can-do-it-you-might-be-able-to-as-well sort of way. Or maybe you know someone who might.

That's a big ask, I know. Maybe I shouldn't be asking it. But I do know this: I'm supposed to tell Will's story. You're supposed to know about Will. So here you go. I'll leave the rest up to God.
 

***

Will with his fiancé Tara, her son, and his daughter.

What do you do when the only person willing to save your life is in jail for taking one? That’s Will Hunter’s reality. 

Will, 39, faces a grueling routine every week. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays he wakes up before the sun rises, travels to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and gets hooked up to a machine for four hours. That machine takes the blood out of his body, filters it, and then puts it back in. Over and over and over again. 

Will Hunter is a dialysis patient. He faces the grim reality of many African-Americans: kidney failure. In fact, Black people are three times as likely to suffer from renal (kidney) disease than White people, according to the National Kidney Foundation, and they make up 35% of dialysis patients even though they represent only 13% of the population.

Hunter can survive on dialysis, sure, but it’s no way to live. In addition to the four hours spent attached to the machine, it takes him hours to recover. Many days he goes straight home to rest. That has an effect on both his personal and professional life. He is a master bricklayer, owns his own business even, and on dialysis days he either has to sacrifice precious, revenue-producing hours or push himself to the point of exhaustion to provide for his family, which includes a fiancé and her teenage son as well as a young daughter that lives out of state.

It’s a reality he’s been living since 2018. That’s when he started getting debilitating headaches and noticed blood in his urine. A trip to the ER resulted in the news: he had end-stage renal failure, the byproduct of prolonged and untreated high blood pressure. It was the last thing he wanted to hear, and in some ways he pretended like he didn’t. He went back to work to try and push through the busy season. But that landed him back in the hospital with sepsis as his organs and body started shutting down.

“I had to learn how to walk, talk, and read again,” he tells me of the ordeal, laying on his bed, tired and wiped out having just come back from dialysis on a Saturday. He eventually accepted his new reality instead of running away from it: He would be on dialysis until he found someone, anyone, willing to save his life and donate a kidney. So now he sits. Three times a week he physically sits for hours in the dialysis chair, yes, but he also figuratively sits on the transplant list, waiting like someone at a banquet hoping their raffle ticket is called. 

So far, his number hasn’t come up. Yet he still hopes, still prays, that someone comes forward — either a friend, a family member, or a stranger — that is deemed a match and can change his life in a very real and practical way forever.

***

Let’s be real: If you were to face a life-altering event like Hunter’s, it’s likely you have a list of friends you could count on. People who will be there for you when you need them. Will thought he had those friends, but he was wrong. 

“When you’re going through something like that, all your friends, they all leave you,” he explains. “When something like this happens they just act like you’re dead already.” 

“I was the guy everybody came to when they were in trouble and they needed financial help or something like that,” he adds. “I was the one they turned to, and now they felt I wasn’t in that position to help them no more so they didn’t have a use for me.”

Hopelessness and eventually depression set in. 

“The loneliness and the way people treat you...I had to find my inner strength and reinvent myself,” he says. He eventually found that through his faith, which included joining a church and getting “new friends who really care about me.”

Now, though, the person who other always turned to for help has found himself in desperate need of help himself. That brings us back to the beginning. Not many people in his circle have been tested to see if they are a match. In fact, there’s only one person he knows who is willing to do so, his brother. 

There’s just one problem. 

That brother is currently serving life in prison for taking someone else’s life. And so far his requests to be tested have been denied. 

That leaves Will’s life in the hands of someone facing death inside a cell. And until or unless something changes with that situation, he waits. And waits. And waits. 

Will, the man who everyone turned to in their time of need, can’t find someone in his. Good Will is hunting, and he’s hunting for a kidney.

***

If you or someone you know is willing to get tested as a donor for Will, you can contact Jeffery Klister, RN, BSN, St. Luke’s Medical Center (Milwaukee, WI), at 414-646-0584. Or email him at Jeffery.Klister@aurora.org. You don’t have to be local to get tested.

And if you have any questions about the process, just respond to this email. I'd love to talk.