
By Cynthia Flash, Special to The Seattle Medium
For more than 45 years, Michael Parker was there for his wife, Lucille, one of the world’s longest continuous dialysis patients – and from what is known, most likely the longest Black continuous dialysis patient.
Feisty and outspoken throughout her life, Lucille passed last April, just a month after turning 66. Michael was there, just as he had been from the time he met Lucille in Illinois so many years earlier. “One day I seen her and she was across the street and I said, ‘oh, girl.’ A couple weeks later she walked up to me. She said ‘I wanted to meet you; I heard a lot about you,’” he said. They had a love affair for the ages, despite their age difference of eight years. “I said, ‘who is this young girl?’ She was very pretty and very mature,” he said.
Lucille was diagnosed with kidney disease very early in life, at age 19. A year later she started dialysis treatments to clean waste and water from her blood, replacing the work her failing kidneys could no longer do. Although Michael knew of Lucille’s illness, neither likely realized when they met what it really meant and how it would play such a role in their lives as they grew old together.
But Michael knew it was important that Lucille receive the best care possible. In the late 1970s he convinced her to move back to his home in Seattle, where he had heard good things about the dialysis care offered by Northwest Kidney Centers and thought that Lucille might have a better chance of getting a kidney transplant.
Eventually she got one. But it failed, and Lucille went back on dialysis – this time becoming one of the early users of in-home dialysis treatments. Michael became her coach, home nurse and cheerleader. As many partners of dialysis patients do, Michael made sure his wife safely connected to the dialysis machine several times a week and managed the heavy boxes of liquid dialysate and other medical supplies needed for the home dialysis machine.
“Mike is an expert at the equipment, the supplies, setting it all together,” Lucille said in a video recorded last year for Northwest Kidney Centers. “Having Mike around me to support me and to keep pushing me is what I needed.”
Michael agreed: “We grew up with dialysis. The main thing when we was introduced to the illness is that you have to accept it for what it is. That means when you marry someone, it’s for better and for worse. I’ve watched her from running to semi-walking and now she’s in a wheelchair.”
Thinking back to last year, Michael acknowledges it wasn’t always easy. “You have to do a lot of sacrifice. Things we want to do, we can’t do, and we have to work together to resolve the problem and the attitudes,” he said, adding that he viewed dialysis like getting up in the morning and going to bed at night – something they had do. “We had our ups and downs. We had to argue sometime when she didn’t want to get on (the machine). I said ‘I can’t force you to get on, but if you care about me, you have to get on.’ She chose life, and that’s why we were on for 45 years.”
And he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“We always managed to get to it, somehow, all these years. It was very difficult. But love is something else. Love is putting yourself last and others first. It’s about sacrifice. All these years I sacrificed my life for her life. Because it’s important to me. Every time I see a kidney center, I think about her. When I go in the hospital now for myself, I think about her,” said Michael, now 75. “It’s a constant thought because that’s all I had in my life for 46 years.”
A love story for the ages
Theirs is an enviable love story. They did everything together, from traveling around the country in a motorhome, washing cars, cutting the grass and painting houses to singing in the church choir on Sunday and going to the movies on Saturday night. Lucille worked as an office manager while raising their son and daughter and Mike worked as a dry cleaner along with the other businesses he started.
“She was my partner on everything, and we were very close,” said Michael, who added that the two were the life of the party, often showing up dressed alike in matching colors. “We both had a sense of humor and that’s what kept us going. We did cry together, but we laughed about it too.”
Michael says that “When you find someone you care about, you put yourself behind that person. This will be your life. I found the person I want to be with. I told her ‘I’m never going to leave.’ I said ‘I’m going to be with you until the end’ until she took her last breath. It was real challenging and I don’t regret one day of it. I learned a lot about life, love and sacrifice. Before she passed she thanked me.”
About kidney disease
Lucille inherited a genetic condition from her father that inflames the small blood vessels in the kidneys. That put her in the minority of people with kidney failure, who more often develop kidney problems after a history of diabetes or uncontrolled high blood pressure. Over the years, she died three times. She had a heart attack at a dialysis clinic and was revived by a nurse who administered CPR until the medics arrived. She pulled through two additional near-death experiences, battled intestinal infection, and had a hip replacement.
Michael said that the last five years of Lucille’s life were touch and go, and the last two years were “terrible. I had to sleep on the dialysis room floor with her because she was in a lot of pain.” But, he said, like a commitment to God, he made a commitment to care for Lucille. “I’m still going through pain and suffering and it’s going to take a while to get over this grief. I definitely need God in my life. I can’t turn to nobody else to help me get through this.”
But in the end, he said, “I don’t regret a day of it.”
Michael and Lucille’s story offers the opportunity to raise awareness of kidney disease, which affects more than 1 in 7 Americans and more than 1 in 3 Black Americans. March is National Kidney Month, a time to focus on health and learn about kidney disease, which oftentimes can be prevented and controlled. Here are some tips:
• Follow prescribed treatments to control diabetes and/or high blood pressure, the biggest causes of kidney disease.
• Lose extra weight with a healthy diet and regular exercise.
• Don’t overuse over-the-counter pain medicines.
• Don’t smoke.
• Eat more fresh food to avoid the damaging salt that preserves our processed food.
• Know your family health history.
• Ask your doctor to test you for kidney disease if you are at risk — take a quiz to find out at https://www.nwkidney.org/living-with-kidney-disease/am-i-at-risk/overview/
For more information about kidney disease, go to nwkidney.org.