Bernadeia Johnson served as superintendent for four years in one of Minnesota’s largest school districts. The stress of the job, poor nutritional choices, and not receiving regular medical check-ups led to a health crisis.
A tool used to determine the severity of the crisis allowed Blacks to fall through the cracks. Now on the road to recovery, she tells her story so others can avoid experiencing her health scare. One of the reasons Johnson left Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) was what she refers to as a “succession of deaths.”
Her grandparents were ill, and her husband was battling cancer. “I helped them to transition off this earth,” she says. “I saw it as a privilege and an act of love to be able to take care of them in their final days.”
Knowing she didn’t want to stop working immediately, she considered a position at Minnesota State University-Mankato’s College of Education after her grandparents passed. Their teacher licensure program focuses on racial equity. Johnson teaches using techniques she learned at MPS. She joined their faculty in 2015.
While at MPS, she was unaware that her health was declining. Her attention was focused elsewhere. “I had 8,000 employees in Minneapolis. I had 36,000 students,” she explains. “I tended to take care of all those people first, and I came second.”
Canceling a scheduled doctor’s appointment due to urgent district matters was common. Stressful board meetings often ran well past dinnertime. “I would drive straight for McDonald’s drive-through and get a large French fry with extra salt.”
Before his illness, her husband made her dinner each evening to support healthier eating habits. She would sit down and eat a little before saying she was full. “Then I would get up, get a bag of potato chips, and go make me some red Kool-Aid.”
As a part of her role as superintendent, she met with then-mayor R.T. Ryback rotating monthly between his office and hers. She recalls during a visit to his office an occasion when the elevators were out, forcing them to take the stairs.
“I was huffing and puffing, and I couldn’t blow down the three little pigs’ house if I wanted to,” she says. Ryback voiced his concerns about her health and urged her to change her eating habits. “I would get mad at him, but he was telling the truth.”
Besides her husband and the mayor, few people were frank about her health and eating habits. “I was the superintendent,” she says. “I was overweight, obese, and out of shape. Most people would have been afraid to say something like that to me.”
She and her doctor had discussed deteriorating kidney function, but she never felt a sense of urgency. Undiagnosed diabetes, years of uncontrolled high blood pressure, and excess weight caused her kidney to deteriorate to the point of needing a transplant.
“I wasn’t exercising, so I ignored my physical health. I ignored my mental health. And the one thing I have come to recognize is [that] I ignored my spiritual health,” she says. “You can’t do a job like Minneapolis and not be in somebody’s church on Sunday morning.”
When she was initially put on a transplant list, her weight prevented her from being able to have surgery. “That pushed me into action. I cut out salt, and I lowered my carbs. I started to exercise,” she says.
The Estimated Glomerular Filtration Rate (eGFR) “shows how well the kidneys are filtering,” according to the National Kidney Foundation. A blood test used to measure creatinine and cystatin C in the blood is combined with body type, sex and age to calculate kidney function.
Using race as an indicator negatively impacted 14,000 Black people across the country, who were moved up on the transplant list when awareness of the disparities the test caused was realized.
Johnson believes this is why there was no sense of urgency at appointments. “How can there be urgency when…it looked like your kidneys were functioning better than they were because of this algorithm they use?”
Johnson received five notifications of a kidney. When she finally received her transplant, it was stressful because notifications indicated an available kidney, not a definite transplant. The kidney she received came to her hours after she was prepped for surgery.
Her transplanted kidney would come late because a car accident had prevented it from being transported on an earlier flight. Surgery and recovery were a long process but occurred without incident.
Johnson is about 50 pounds lighter and takes 25 pills in the morning and 20 at night. This is a lifetime sentence. She will return to work in the fall.
“Blacks or African Americans are almost four times more likely, and Hispanics or Latinos are 1.3 times more likely to have kidney failure compared to White Americans,” according to the National Kidney Foundation. Johnson advocates for learning healthy eating habits early.
“My grandkids only drink water,” she says. And her son doesn’t allow them to go to McDonald’s. On a rare occasion when her grandson did go, he told her, “I was supposed to get water, and they gave me a Sprite. It was so spicy, I don’t like it.”
The National Kidney Foundation, at www.kidney.org/kidney-quiz, offers a quick kidney disease risk assessment. Johnson suggests that those with risks discuss it with their doctor. She also suggests making and keeping regular appointments, maintaining a medical journal, and asking the doctor to clarify confusing diagnoses or health advice.
Negative health impacts on Blacks are exacerbated by low participation in medical trials, Johnson says. “It’s a vicious cycle. On the one hand, we have Black people who are not participating in research at the levels we need them to.
But on the other hand, we have a history of being abused and mistreated when we do participate. “We’ve got to figure out how to build the trust between these systems and the people.”