"I went to see my primary care physician at that time, and they recommended I go see a urologist and they put me in the hospital for a day. They did a test called IVP [intravenous pyelogram], which was really designed to test if my bladder was working properly or not. And the test came back perfectly normal.

 They decided that just for me, you know, some people have a little bit of protein or blood in the urine and it's normal. And that was the case. They didn't even look at my kidneys or talk about anything else.

When we moved to Atlanta, I saw a new primary care physician and he did some tests and he told me, “I don't care what anybody else has ever told you, you need to get to see a nephrologist as fast as you can.”

It wasn’t until I got to see a nephrologist and they told me my kidney was functioning at like 56 percent that I knew something was wrong.

At that point, the original time I met with my nephrologist, they didn't really know what was wrong with my kidney, but they said that I would need to do a kidney biopsy to truly find out what the cause is.

[The] biopsy itself wasn't so bad, but getting the diagnosis was one of the worst days of my life."