This week we present two stories from people who were at the end of their rope.

Part 1: After donating her kidney to a friend, Leah Waters struggles to get back to normal.

Leah Waters is a multiplatform editor at The Dallas Morning News and also advises journalism programs at Frisco Heritage High School. Waters received her M.A. in Journalism from University of North Texas’ Mayborn School of Journalism in 2017. She also majored in journalism at Angelo State University in 2010, where she was the campus newspaper’s editor-in-chief. Waters currently serves as the Texas Association of Journalism Educators’ State Director and as a vice president of the Association of Texas Photography Instructors. She is a first amendment advocate and testified this session in support of a bill that would restore student press rights in Texas.

Part 2: When the coral colonies of her childhood experience a bleaching event, Native Hawaiian coral biologist Narrissa Spies must face her greatest fear to protect them.

Narrissa Spies is a Native Hawaiian scientist who was born and raised on the island of Hawaii. She received her bachelor and master’s degrees from the University of Hawaii at Hilo, and is in the process of completing her PhD at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She has previously worked as a researcher, curriculum developer, and educator, and has a passion for marine conservation. In her current position she is on a team that manages ecological services on Oahu, Kauai, American Samoa, and Papahanaumokuakea.

Note: As promised, you can find twenty of our funniest stories on the podcast here.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Leah Waters

So, I was sitting on my couch wearing pajamas one day in February when my friend Alyssa sent me a message that a former student of hers needed a kidney. Her name was Neelam and Neelim is the name that I'd heard before but I had never met her. I knew she was a rock star high school journalist, a talented writer.

My friend Alyssa said that Neelim got sick over Christmas break and she was hospitalized with really high blood pressure. And then they discovered that an autoimmune disease had killed her kidneys.

And so I close out Amazon and open up Google and I searched for IgA nephropathy or Berger’ s disease, which is Neelim's condition. Then I opened up a new tab after Alyssa sent me information on how to be a donor for the Medical City Fort Worth's Transplant Institute.

Honestly, I didn't know why I felt so compelled to help this girl other than the fact that I knew she was suffering and I knew if I didn't help her, I don't know what would happen. So I fill out the form that night just to see if I would be a match. It turns out later that I was.

Leah Waters shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Wild Detectives in Dallas, TX in November 2019. Photo by Fallon Stovall.

So the next few weeks was spent in donor education and evaluation. I had blood and urine tests, x-rays EKGs, things like that. And I also had to sit down with the social worker so that they could evaluate my mental wellness.

She asked me, “Have you ever had suicidal thoughts or actions?” And I said, “No,” without hesitation. I think a part of me must have known that if I had said yes or hesitated in some way, they never would have let me give my kidney to Neelim. At that point, I didn't want anything to stop me. I didn’t want anything, including the fact that I had to collect my urine for 24 hours. This is my joke. It gets better.

And I didn't want to wait for the long weekend so I took this jug to work with me. I would go to the bathroom and I'd be in the jug and I’d put it in a brown paper sack, I folded it and I wrote, “Leah's lunch. Do not eat.” And I would walk down the hall to our shared refrigerator and I’d put it in there and just prayed no one opened it.

I do that several times a day and just chitchat with my colleagues with my day’s bladder contents in my hand. And so that was the last step before the committee cleared me to be her donor, which they did the next day.

I was so excited and so I sent Neelim an email right then that there was a stranger who had a kidney with her name on it.

About a week after that, Neelim and I met. We shook hands inside her parents’ home in McKinney. We were sitting on the couch making small talk, smiling naturally, but it all felt very polite and forced. And it felt like if anyone spoke too quickly or too wrongly that this whole thing would fall apart.

So I just started rambling and I talked about how I first heard about Neelim's condition and what my medical tests showed and things like that, but we didn't talk too much about the surgery. We talked mostly about our love of journalism, mutual friends, petty gossip, Game of Thrones, but I could still see this stress in her parents’ eyes.

I mean they must have thought it was crazy, and at the very least naive about the consequences of my decision. But I knew that even if I were crazy, she was still getting a kidney.

So four days later, we were sitting side-by-side in our rolling hospital beds. We had IVs in our arms. There was a white curtain that hung between us and I asked the nurse if she could pull it back because I wanted to see her and I wanted to show her that I was there. I wasn't going anywhere.

So the curtain opened and my breath kind of caught and my stomach dropped the way it does when you're on a roller coaster right before the fall. She gave me a shaky thumbs up and her mom held her hand and her dad stood over her.

And I did not see the smart, passionate, young woman who loved to tell stories or hang out with her friends or eat a bag of chips whenever she wanted. I saw a girl who spent the last six weeks learning to be a person with an incurable disease. Six weeks of sleepless nights, panic attacks, constant hunger, weight gain, mood swings and it felt like the longest six weeks of my life because I knew it was the most helpless six weeks of hers.

So we were sitting in the beds in our matching blue-and-white gowns minutes before surgery. And I told her something that I wanted to believe but I couldn't guarantee. I said, “It's all going to be okay.”

It took surgeons an hour-and-a-half to take out my kidney. Neelim’s surgery took three hours, and before surgery she had 9% kidney function. After, it was at 98%. And after I woke up from surgery, I was just so relieved that she was doing better so the next day I went home and I was healing and I felt happy and hopeful.

A couple of weeks after surgery, a friend, who could not fathom why anyone would possibly do this and give a kidney to a stranger, asked me why I had done it. Honestly, I hesitated because I never asked myself why. I just did it. But now, a few weeks post-transplant, that's all I thought about.

So when my doctors finally cleared me to go back to work, I was relieved that I could just get back to normal. But normal never came. I was tired all the time. I struggled to sleep. I knew I should be eating better but I had no appetite. I stopped returning phone calls and I stopped paying bills on time or giving timely feedback to my students. I'm reading books weekly or cooking, making cookies, anything that I would normally do. And I had never felt so helpless in my entire life.

Except that wasn't quite true. This feeling that I had it felt familiar and it came from a time from before the surgery, from a time when I had needed help.

People don't like to ask for help, I've discovered. The help that we need, these are the things that sit on a shelf in our mind and they're pushed back by the present until you just nearly forget they're there. They are things that are dark and unspeakable, and they'll follow you to your grave if you let them.

When I was 16, I started collecting pills. When things would get bad, I would drop a few more into the melatonin bottle that I would fill with over-the-counter painkillers I'd siphoned off from my parents without raising suspicion. And one day when my stupid teenage brain could find no other escape, I felt relief knowing that I had that bottle tucked under my bed. And that day when I reached for it, I could not have told you why. It just would not have made sense to a rational mind.

But later that night, I felt this clawing pain in my stomach and my screams woke my parents up. I remember rolling on the ground like I was on fire and I cried over and over again, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I’m sorry. I crawled into the bathroom and I hugged the toilet and I empty my insides into it.

My parents were frantic and pacing and they called poison control. Soon, I think they realized I would not die after all and they left me alone then. I remember I put my cheek against the cold tile and I fell asleep and I didn't wake up again until they told me it was time to go to school. So I got up and dressed and I rode to school and I walked to class in a daze. It was my 17th birthday.

So my shelves are unbearably heavy sometimes but I've learned something that's healing. Every once in a while, I'll take down these things from my shelf and I'll call them by name. I'll say, “This is my anxiety. This is my depression.” I'll tell that to my friends and my family whose things look a lot like mine.

So day by day, after the surgery, the more I shared with my family and friends, the better that I felt when I talked about it. I realized I wanted to talk with Neelim.

And so about a month after our surgeries that left us both with one healthy kidneys, we sat in her kitchen barefoot drinking chai. We ate pizza and we talked about our incision pain and how it still hurt when we laughed or sneezed sometimes. And how she was going stir-crazy with her post-transplant house-arrest.

We had developed a friendship over the past month and I really wanted to see for myself that she was really doing better. And my family and friends said I didn't owe her friendship, and I told them I didn't owe her a kidney either but I gave it anyway. And I was also there because I wanted to explain to her why I had given her a kidney.

I told her it felt like there was this kid out there in the ocean drowning and there I was, I was the only one on the shore at the time. That someone might have come along eventually, maybe. But if everyone thought that way, a kid could drown before someone could get to them.

And I was also there because I wanted to tell her about my shelf and the things that I hid there, because during those dark times after my surgery I was really afraid that the girl who ate pills and the woman who peered over bridges wanted to help people not because they needed it but because I needed it, because I wanted to prove my life was worth something.

So we leaned our heads close together and I whispered to her about a 16-year-old girl who needed help and never asked for it. I told her about how hard it is to talk about things that terrify and shame you.

And then she said something that should have surprised me but didn't. She said, “It's funny you're saying all this because me too,” and we laughed and cried a little bit. She told me about the things on her shelf, things that look like mine and others that were completely her own.

We spent our time that night talking about her health and mine. I had good days where I felt like myself again and then I had days where dark thoughts sat in a corner, quiet but alive. We talked about our futures and our friendships, but mostly we talked into the night about stories, the ones we loved and the ones we hated, the ones we hope to write someday. Stories about people with shelves, stories about people who need help and yet can offer it too. Thank you.

Part 2: Narissa Spies

Growing up in Hawaii, the ocean was my background and it was my sanctuary. I close my eyes now and I can still smell the briny sea. I can taste the salt in the air and I especially remember hearing the waves crashing and the beautiful creatures that I'd see in the tide pools. Seeing these things every day, because I spent nearly every day at the shoreline as a child, they really sparked my fascination with science. It sort of led me on this path.

My absolute favorite place in the world is a place called Puako. It's my ocean backyard, really. And Puako has some beautiful beaches but the best thing about Puako is underwater. All you need to experience that is a snorkel and a sense of adventure.

Places like this in Hawaii are what pushed me into a path towards science. And I began a bachelor's degree in biology and anthropology. I immediately started a master's degree studying coral reef health and genetics.

I absolutely loved collecting data. I loved the science. I loved doing and I loved being hands-on and in the field. But what I absolutely hated was the talking. I hated going to scientific conferences. i would look at my notes and I would not look up for fear of connecting with eyes in the audience. I felt that I should let the experts have the say while I lost myself beneath the waves.

So rather than pushing my voice out there, I let others speak. And what I did instead was push through to my education on my own path and I pursued a PhD.

Narissa Sppies shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Hawaii Brian’s in Honolulu, HI in November 2019. Photo by Lisa Helfert.

So the Kewalo Marine Lab is actually here in Honolulu and that was my home for most of my PhD work. It's not too far from here and there's a spot on the shoreline where, if you close your eyes and sit right along the break wall, the waves crashing will completely drown out the roar of the city, the sirens and the noise. It just allows you to be at peace with the sea.

I spent an obscene amount of time in the tanks at Kewalo Marine Lab taking care of my corals. And I got really close with them. I actually had coral colonies, some of which I even gave names to, treated them like pets.

Latasha was my first coral colony. Big Mama produced the most coral larvae. They strongly preferred Hawaiian music over rock music and, with the proper soundtrack, they'd produce more larvae.

Life was really, really good and I was enjoying my time at the marine lab. It was sort of a comfortable sanctuary for me. Then in 2014 something happened. The sea water temperature in our tanks started to increase. My coral colonies started to turn pale and then they bleached white. Hawaii was in the midst of a coral bleaching event.

So coral bleaching happens when a coral gets really stressed out, like if the temperature in the water gets too warm they spit out these algae that live inside of them that also make most of their food. And if the stress stays around for too long, the corals eventually starve to death.

Corals, they're really cool. They're amazing animals. They don't lick your face or wag their tails but they are animals like us. They react to light the same way as us, they even have skeletons similar to ours, which is pretty cool.

An interesting thing about them is they make up less than 0.1% of the entire ocean floor but they support a quarter of all life in the ocean. And here in Hawaii we know how important they are because they break up wave energy. They allow us to have those really nice surf breaks and, more importantly, they keep our shorelines from eroding away.

So 2014 bleaching event ended, but in 2015 we got hit with another bleaching event. I was actually headed out to a study site on a boat and I leaned over the edge and I saw nothing but stark white colonies below me. I knew it was going to be really, really bad.

The most difficult part for me, I had a strong connection to the ocean but it shocked me how few people in Hawaii had that same connection with the sea. It actually shocked me even more how few of them knew how to swim on an island. They didn't realize that in their own backyards the ocean was collapsing right under their noses.

In 2015, the second bleaching event, Hawaii lost a third of their corals and I was hit pretty hard as a coral biologist. Certain areas of Hawaii were hit harder than others. My ocean backyard Puako lost 90% of its corals and I was absolutely devastated. It took me two years before I had the nerve to go back to Puako and I could not get in the water. And actually, to date, I haven't been in the water.

But what I saw from the shoreline shook me. The water smelled funny. It was slimy and there were globs of algae everywhere. I'd lost my backyard and I refuse to let it happen again. I felt an urgency like I'd never felt before. The ocean could not wait for me to find my voice and I needed to do something so that my kids wouldn't read about coral reefs in history books.

In 2016, I got asked to work on a whitepaper describing the biological and cultural significance of a place called Papahanaumokuakea. It's a marine monument. So after the main Hawaiian Islands that you’ve seen on the map, the islands actually extend another thousand miles and it's an incredible place. It's got the highest rate of endemism anywhere in the world. That means something that's found there and nowhere else. Half of the animals and plants in Papahanaumokuakea are found there and nowhere else, so if they're lost there, they're lost to the world forever.

I worked behind the scenes on that whitepaper and I was really proud of that because it was a way for me to sort of dip my toe in the water but still kind of keep my voice behind the scenes. Then I worked with a group asking President Obama to expand the monument and make it extend rather than 50 miles offshore to 200 miles offshore.

I work with a really amazing group of people. And before President Obama left his office in 2016, time flies when you're having fun, he expanded the monument making it the largest protected area on the planet and I was elated. I thought, “Man, we are finally on the right track here towards conservation, towards protecting our ocean.”

A personal high for me was I actually got to meet my ocean hero, Dr. Sylvia Earle when she came to the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Honolulu. She was actually also a co-author on the whitepaper that I had helped to write. And when she found out that I'd worked on the expansion project, she dropped her hands, my hands that she was holding, and she embraced me. She gave me the warmest hug, and it felt just like my grandmother would have hugged me.

And I realized that, to her, I was an ocean hero. And it made me really proud of what a group of people with a shared vision of ocean protections could do.

About a year after that, I was in the marine lab, my comfortable space again, and I got a Facebook message. I was setting up an experiment in my lab and I got a Facebook message from a colleague.

He said, “Hey, what are you doing next week? You want to come to New York and give a talk?”

I'm like, “All right. I've never been to New York before. That sounds like a good idea.” It was also the same weekend as the March for Science, so I was really excited. I was like, “Yeah, climate change. We’re going to do something about it.” Everyone was really excited about supporting science.

On Monday morning I was on a conference call to find out more about this really cool speaking engagement my friend had told me about, and I found out that I'd be speaking at the United Nations. I was the most nervous I've ever been in my entire life, by far. I had about 48 hours to write my speech and get to New York.

I was like, “I can do this. This is great. I'll be fine.” And I get home and sit down to start writing my speech and it hits me. First of all, I couldn't procrastinate as grad students tend to do. And I also realized that I had to go beyond just speaking about science, because this was a different audience. That I had to really make a connection with these policymakers so that they would get it.

I made my way to New York in that in that 48 hours and I was thinking about Papahanaumokuakea. I was in my hotel room and I was trying to clear my mind, get out of my own head and I turn on the TV as background noise. I saw President Trump on TV and he was surrounded by other leaders from the Pacific and he was announcing that some monuments were being called under review, including all marine monuments.

And that was another punch to the gut for me. How was I supposed to convince these leaders at the United Nations that we needed to protect our oceans when the leader of our country didn't even think they needed protections?

I made it to the UN and I started my speech. Marine protected areas are a crucial part of marine conservation and I continued through that speech without a hitch. I didn't freeze up. I didn't forget my speech. And what I noticed when I looked at the faces in the crowd, they were all nodding along in agreement with things that I was saying. A lot of their faces looked a lot like mine. They were Pacific Islanders, a lot of them, just like me. And they had connections to the ocean just like me.

One thing that sort of helped me focus when I was sitting there in a roomful of leaders scared out of my wits, was looking down in my hand at the picture that I had and it was a picture of my niece. She loves the ocean just as much as I do. And I realized that I wasn't trying to save the ocean for all of humanity. I was just trying to save them for her, for her children, so that she would grow up with an ocean backyard just like I did.

Today, I'm still introverted. I'd rather have teeth pulled than speak in front of audiences, but I also recognize that I have an intergenerational responsibility. Like I said earlier, the ocean can't wait for me to find my voice. I think us as scientists, we need to get beyond just collecting data, publishing it in a scientific journal where only other scientists will read it.

We need to have emotions about our work and we need to communicate that to people so that they will know what is happening in our planet. We need to find our voice and communicate what we know best. We need to share the burden by presenting at the UN. Those people in the room is sort of like passing the torch. It's sharing the burden. It's not the entire problem on your shoulders anymore.

And with a shared common goal of marine conservation, we're going to make really good changes. And so that's the entirety of why I'm here tonight, to share the burden and know that I can have emotions about my work and I should be sharing those. Because if I'm not and I just publish them in a scientific journal where only other scientists are going to seek them out, they're going to disappear beneath the waves like bleached corals.

And that's the entirety of why I'm here tonight. For my family and for my future children, so that they can grow up with an ocean backyard just like I did. Thank you.