Editor's note: This story is part of Southwest Michigan Second Wave's On the Ground Battle Creek series.


Talking with people about her husband Maxwell’s need for a kidney was not something Jennifer Joy Jackson Nkansah was comfortable doing.
 
“I just remembered Max’s doctor saying, ‘As often as you can, talk about it.’ I was getting uncomfortable putting it on Facebook and talking about it because I thought my friends, in particular, would say, “It’s Jen. She’s going to ask me for body parts.”
 
The Licensed Professional Counselor and Therapist, who lives with her husband and two children in Portage, knew she had to put that discomfort aside to find a possible donor who would give her husband the opportunity to live.
 
She found that donor in May at a Clothing Swap they had each been invited to at a mutual friend’s home in Kalamazoo.
 
As she was being asked to share something about herself or her life in a casual conversation at the gathering, she said, “If anybody wants to be a living donor, my husband is in need of a kidney.” This caught the attention of Jill Anderson, who lives in Battle Creek and is well-known in the community for her involvement in numerous causes and organizations, including the Rotary Club of Battle Creek where she currently serves as president.
 
Anderson, owner of Jill Anderson Grants, says she picked up on the embarrassed tone in Nkansah’s voice as she spoke about the life-or-death situation her family was living with.
 
“(Jennifer) said that her husband had been on dialysis three days a week for five years. She said that her husband had to get a kidney and talked about how hard this has been on their family,” Anderson says. “I wondered what it takes to give a kidney.”
 
Anderson is no stranger to the topic of organ donation having grown up with a father who served as the Chief Operating Officer for the former Leila Y. Post Montgomery Hospital and also played a key role in the establishment of LifeCare Ambulance in Battle Creek.
 
“I had already thought about organ donation because of my dad and his standing in the hospital and ambulance community. He had always given a lot of blood and encouraged us to do that. When my brother and I got our driver’s licenses we had ‘The Talk’ about organ donation,” Anderson says. “We had a family ethic about this. It was just something that had been modeled in my family.”
 
Like many people, Anderson says she has seen signs in the rear window of cars identifying someone in need of a kidney. She says it was more impactful to come face-to-face with the reality of what someone is dealing with.
 
“I could really see the pain of her husband’s health in her,” Anderson says.

Nkansah says she stood and watched as Anderson retrieved her Red Cross identification card from her purse and announced that she was O positive, the same blood type as Maxwell Nkansah.
 
“I said shut the (expletive) up when she told me this,” Nkansah says. “(Jill) said, ‘No, I am.’ She said she didn’t know what it takes to be a donor, but that her dad was a big blood donor. The next day she texted us to say that she was going to get in touch with the transplant center at the University of Michigan Hospital.”
 
Max Nkansah, who is originally from Ghana and served as the Pastor of the Olivet Congregational Church, says he knew better than to get his hopes up.
 
Maxwell Nkansah is still in recovery from his kidney transplant.“I didn’t want to be happy about it because so many people promise to do this and then they back off,” he says. “Sometimes they say the number they were given to call isn’t working or they wouldn’t call back. When they said they would do it, we just say yes. We leave it up to them to start the initial process and let us know what is going on.”
 
He says he decided long ago that “it was in God’s hands and it would happen if he decided to do something about it.”
 
Anderson contacted the transplant team at U of M and underwent six months of tests which resulted in the confirmation that she would be a match for Max Nkansah.
 
“(Jill) kept passing one test and going on to the next one,” he says. “I asked in June if I could call her just to see and I met her and I was like, ‘She’s gone farther than anyone else.'”
 
Maxwell and Jennifer Nkansah with their children, Sophiah and James, and their dog in the living room of their Portage home.Jennifer Nkansah says Anderson also texted them with updates about her many tests.
 
On November 18, Nkansah and Anderson underwent individual surgeries which lasted less than three hours.
 
“It all came together rather quickly,” Anderson says of the testing, match confirmation, and surgery.
 
From Max Nkansah’s perspective, it was a long time coming.
 
“His doctor said that after about three or four years, dialysis starts to negatively impact your heart and lungs. That was very scary,” says Jennifer Nkansah.
 
Her husband’s kidney issues surfaced when he went into the hospital for what would be diagnosed as a brain bleed. That bleed, Max says, became secondary to the kidney failure which gradually impacted every part of his life and to a lesser extent the lives of his wife and children.
 
“I gave up my job right away because I didn’t know what was happening,” he says.
 
Gradually, he began to lose weight and would become too fatigued to participate in family or school events and activities. 
 
While he was on dialysis, he might have had one or two days a week when he’d have more energy. That’s been hard with having young kids and wanting them to have "a happy, joyful childhood,” says Jennifer Nkansah. “It means I’ve had to step up to a different level. There’s been so much that Max has missed out on.”
 
But, he’s not looking back with regret or harboring negative thoughts about the kidney transplant and what could go wrong.
 
“No matter the outcome of what happens, I’m still glad I did this,” he says. “After all this had happened I saw (Jill) once before she went home and I was just crying. I was feeling immense gratitude. What I want to say to her now I don’t have words for so I just have to cry.”
 
 
Preparing and recovering
 
Anderson says she never second-guessed her decision once it was made.
 
“With me, once I get an idea in my head and it’s based on solid principle I have a hard time debating myself out of it. I felt very grounded in that decision and never fluctuated on my commitment.”
 
Her son George, 15, who is a freshman at Battle Creek Central High School, says he was concerned, but also very glad that his mother was healthy enough to help someone out and he thought she made the right decision. The two had many conversations, one of which he says scared him.
 
“The day before the surgery she sat me down and said, ‘George you know I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think you were mature enough to take care of yourself.’ She started tearing up. That last day that I saw her she didn’t seem very serious about it. She was like kind of relaxed about it and not really talking about it too much, just giving updates on her health and that last day she was very dark and I think she actually took into consideration what could happen and she was very serious and in a different mood then I’d ever seen her with before.”
 
Jill Anderson recovers in the University of Michigan Hospital after her kidney donation.Anderson says if her son had been younger and she was the only person he relied on she wouldn’t have put herself out there as a living donor. She says she thought about the possibility that if something does go wrong she could leave her son motherless or get the Nkansah’s hopes up and Max could still die.
 
“One of the reasons I did decide to do this is because I do have a great support system and George is also a part of that great support system,” she says. “It’s our extended communities too. This is bigger than me and Max.”
 
Among the more challenging pieces for her was figuring out how she could fulfill her work, volunteer, and social commitments.
 
“It was interesting because I needed to say ‘no’ to a lot of things and I’m not used to doing that. I needed to prioritize the procedure and my health and that encouraged me to step back. I had to stop a lot of my work contracts and cut down to basically nothing and then go through eight weeks without working after the surgery.”
 
Susan Anderson (Jill's mom) and Jill Anderson at the University of Michigan Hospital for kidney donation.She says she’s already getting “pulled back into a lot of things” but knows when she needs to stop.
 
The recipient of her kidney says his recovery was to take six weeks.
 
“After that, I will have to get used to all of this,” Max Nkansah says.
 
He will have weekly appointments at U of M and weekly blood draws in Kalamazoo. There also will be a follow-up visit with an Endocrinologist.
 
“The doctors are very happy with how it’s going now,” Jennifer Nkansah says.
 
As he was going through his journey, she was going through her own journey which included transitioning her counseling and coaching business into a new venture called Living Metamorphosis.
 
“While I was building my business, I was maintaining our household and making sure he was in a good place,” she says. At the same time, she was making sure their children, Sophiah, 12, and James, 8, were taken care of.
 
“It’s a lot, for almost five years with Max being in dialysis three days a week and he also has some vision things going on,” she says. “After the surgery, there are lots of medications and changes to manage. This is no small peanuts. I am filling his pillbox with the 25 pills he takes twice a day. The first time I did it and the doctor checked, I’d missed one. I’m giving myself Grace and taking time to rest.”
 
No one in this transplant tableau is thinking about what could go wrong in the future.
 
Nkansah and Anderson say they hope that their story will debunk the misconceptions surrounding organ donation and encourage others to become organ donors.
 
They have both encountered people who are surprised to learn that a white woman’s kidney was a match for an African American man.
 
Tom Brothers (Jill's partner), Jill Anderson, Jennifer Joy Jackson Nkansah, and Maxwell Nkansa“There’s this misconception that you have to be real genetically close to donate. Max is from Ghana and we have the same blood type but we’re not even the same race,” Anderson says.
 
Nkansah says he has encountered different reactions from black and white people.
 
“Black people are like ‘What, she’s a white woman’ and the white men are not saying anything but you can see how they’re thinking about it. Education can go a long way to help with this.”
 
“There’s such a need and demand and it’s such an easy way to save a life,” Anderson says. “We are born with four times the kidney power that we need to survive. By giving away half of that, you can save another life and you’ve still got plenty of kidney function.”
 
Jennifer Nkansah says she encourages people to be curious.
 
“It doesn’t have to be a quick ‘yes,'  but it doesn’t have to be a quick ‘no’ either,” she says of the decision to be an organ donor.