by Bert Williams

On doctors’ orders, Carl Thompson carries his cell phone everywhere he goes. He had the phone with him when we met recently on a San Francisco Bay ferry ride. Carl and I were headed from Larkspur in Marin County to AT&T Park in San Francisco. It was Sunday, June 11, and we were going to the ballpark to watch the Giants play the Pittsburg Pirates. Carl’s long cane caught my attention so I took the empty seat next to his.

“You must have been a fan for a while,” I said. “You couldn’t have bought that Will Clark jersey yesterday.”

“Man, I’ve been a Giants fan since Willie McCovey played first base,” he said. “My name is Carl.”

“I’m Bert,” I said, “and I’ve been a fan since Willie Mays played center field.”

From there our conversation moved rapidly, and before long Carl had told me that he could be in the hospital before the day was over. The doctors will admit him as soon as they find the organs he needs.

“They said it’s actually an advantage that I need two organs,” Carl explained. “It puts me higher on the wait list than if I just needed one.”

Carl needs a pancreas and a kidney. If he hasn’t received them by early July, when he has a trip planned to Lake Tahoe, the doctors say they’ll be ready to helicopter him back to the Bay Area within hours.

Now in his late 30s, Carl has been a diabetic since he was 13. “I first knew something was wrong when I started wetting my bed,” he remembers, “and I would get really hungry, but when I’d try to eat something, it would be just a bite or two, and I’d be sick.”

Carl’s dad took him to the doctor. The doctor told Carl that he was a brittle diabetic, and explained that he must monitor his blood sugar frequently and had to go on a strict diet. “I didn’t do what the doctor said,” Carl remembers. “Man, I was 13. Who cares about that stuff when you’re 13.” Before long the doctors began talking to him about losing parts of his arms and legs.

“I said, ‘whoa, this is serious,’ but I still didn’t really care,” Carl said. “My dad tried to keep me on a healthy diet but by the time I was 15, I was a heavy drinker and I’d started smoking pot.”

Carl didn’t get on track with a healthy lifestyle until, at age 25, he met Kim, the woman who has been his companion for the past 13 years. “Kim got me to quit doing a lot of stuff,” Carl said.

Today Carl urges teenagers to take diabetes seriously. “This disease is the number-three killer of teenagers,” he said. “If you don’t take care of yourself, you can end up like me—going blind, with wrecked kidneys, and hoping I don’t lose pieces of my arms or legs. All those years of being a human garbage can is not worth it.”

Carl doesn’t appear sick when you meet him; he’s energetic and friendly, but he isn’t able to hold a job. He has lost the vision in his left eye, and though he can still see out of his right eye, he has lost his driver’s license.

Because of the kidney disease, Carl goes in for dialysis every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That takes too much time out of the week to allow for a full-time job. Carl’s kidney problems were diagnosed six years ago, about the time his son was born. He has been on dialysis for four and a half years.

“When they were first checking out my kidneys, they gave me a gallon jug to pee into,” Carl explained. “At first, I’d fill it up in a weekend, but as the weeks went along, I was going less and less until they just took away the jar. Now I’m only allowed to drink 38 ounces of water a day. That’s just one Big Gulp! And some of the food that’s good for a diabetic, I can’t eat because of the kidneys.”

Carl now receives disability payments from the state, and his dad is paid to be his caregiver. He drives Carl to his dialysis appointments. It takes nearly four hours for the dialysis machine to cleanse Carl’s blood each time he is hooked up to it. The bulging veins in his right forearm show where the hook-up takes place. It takes two needles each time, one for intake and one for outtake.

“I don’t know what I’d do without my dad,” Carl says. “He’s really hanging in there with me.”

I asked Carl if I could share his experience with Connected readers, and he quickly agreed. “If it can help somebody to read about me,” he said, “that’s cool.”

Though Carl said he doesn’t consider himself a religious person, he’s glad to have people praying for him, and I told him I would do that. If you want to offer Carl your encouragement, you can log in below and enter a message for him. I’m going to call Carl regularly to see how he’s doing, and I’ll post updates in Connected.

Bert Williams is editor of Connected magazine.