EP 01: 'All We Know Is She is Dying' -- The D.D. Adams Story
We kick off Municipal Equation with one of the toughest local leaders around -- Winston-Salem City Council Member Denise D. Adams, who crashed through a sudden series of mysterious and deadly health problems all while ramping up a contested re-election campaign. How in the world did she pull through? And how did it change her perspective on life and public service? Huge takeaways here.
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Transcript
On this episode of Municipal Equation.
I get it now when people say when they're dying, they feel this peace.
I was okay. I felt the peace. I was okay. To the edge of death and back with one of the toughest public officials that I've ever talked with. My name is Ben Brown and this is Municipal Equation from the North Carolina League of Municipalities, episode one. Alright. So, municipal equation has a lot to focus on. Policy, challenges, great ideas, the big, the small, whatever characterizes living in a municipality and how we can share ideas to make it better than it already is. We'll talk about infrastructure and how to pay for it. We'll talk about technology. We'll talk about simple things that you can do to make your own personal city experience better. We'll talk about ideas that might even challenge the convention of urban planning, for instance. All of that is ahead on this new podcast series that you're listening to right now, Municipal Equation. But let's start off with a fascinating story, a mysterious story, one of personal resilience, and it comes to us from Winston Salem, North Carolina.
It's about Denise d Adams, a city councilwoman there, and anyone who knows her knows that she's never lacking on life. She's about as tough and robust as they come. I sleep like a tired farmer or a soldier after a day in the field. That's how I feel. And I wake up the next day refreshed, ready to go back to work or to go do battle. That's how I look at it. Adams, who everyone in town knows as Didi,
lives packed out days that would wear any of us out. Council meetings, committee meetings, meetings with constituents, project meetings, community meetings, and so on. Full throttle.
She says she thrives on that. My passion is people, and I know that sounds kinda well. That's everybody. No. No. No. Mine is people.
What you maybe wouldn't assume is that this totally healthy looking public servant has been at the edge of death and back just a few years ago. All kinds of problems intersecting at once and pushing her to the edge without anyone really knowing what the problem was. It's quite a story, and I asked her about it during a recent interview. But first, a quick sample of the kind of person Adams has been since her youth, that is independent and looking for a challenge. For instance
My parents wanted me to go to school here in North Carolina. I got accepted, at Carolina, A and T, Winston Salem State, Howard University, Hampton, Fisk, whole bunch of schools, UNCG. But there was one school that turned me down, and that was Morgan State University in Baltimore. At that time, you know, I thought I was all that. I knew I was smart, and I didn't take no for an answer just like I don't really take no now. And they turned me down because they had met, they said, their out of state quotas. That didn't seem like a reasonable answer to me. I had all of the tests. I had the grades. You know? I was very proud of my academia, you know, career in high school, junior high, whatever. So I had to go about the business of writing letters to request that they reconsider and accept me and tell them I would be a great student and an asset to Morgan State. Lo and behold, after many, many letters, I think they got tired of the letters, they accepted me. My parents and friends could not understand why I would want to go why I wanted to go that far away. I'd never even been to the school for a visit even. So the first day I went there, my my mother, when we drove into Baltimore, my mom saw the dock area, which is now the Inner Harbor. The Inner Harbor wasn't there in '72. It smelled awful. It looked awful. The city was in a it was going through some bad times. The riot era, you know, had passed, but the town was still, blighted from all of that, from the sixties and seventies riots. Crime, they were number one for homicides. Mhmm. And my mother said to me in the car, she said, and you wanted to come here?
She chose Baltimore because it got her out of her element and gave her something to work on, something mysterious and challenging to overcome, and she did. She jokes that the degree she got from Morgan State in 1976 is about as fitting as anything. Speech communication. Adams loves good dialogue and loves engagement. But I had to ask specifically about this story, which she didn't volunteer on her own. She wasn't looking for attention about it. She was mainly focused on life lessons and her style of service and her priorities, which often involved putting up a good fight. But if she was up for a fight, she got the ultimate one in 2012 and 2013,
and it started in a somewhat hopeful way. She was athletic, an avid tennis player, and she started losing weight. I was like, oh, yeah. You know, I'm I'm working out. I'm playing tennis, golf. I'm doing it all. I'm I'm I'm just finally paying off. I started to feel bad. I felt I've I've never been sick a day in my life. And at that point, I was, what, I don't know, 60, 59, something. I'd never been sick, so I didn't know what sick was. I thought it was a virus, a flu, something, you know. I started going to the doctors, and, nobody could find anything wrong with it, and it kept getting worse. I couldn't eat. Food tasted like metal, and I really didn't want people to know how sick I was because I'm still trying to figure out maybe it's something that I'm not doing. I'm going to the doctors. They're giving me all these drugs. They want me to see psychiatrists. They think it's in my head, and I had to tell them, It is not in my head. I am sick. Something's wrong internally.
Dizzy spells set on, and she even passed out at work a couple times, And then she broke out in a rash, which brought her to the dermatologist.
She didn't know what it was. She took a biopsy. The next morning, she called me and told me it was lupus.
Lupus is a non contagious autoimmune disease where the body's immune system attacks healthy tissue and organs. It is treatable, but it's not curable.
I felt somehow relieved because now at least I know what's wrong with me. It wasn't in my head. But that was just the beginning of it all. The last council meeting in April I went to, I was very, very sick. Everybody knew I was sick. I couldn't even get down the stairs. They had to help me down the stairs. I came home from the council meeting that night, and I was so sick. I was cold. I came home. I changed out of my suit, put on my pajamas, covered up with a blanket in here, my den, the other room. And then I remember moving to my bedroom, and that's all I remember.
Adams said she was knocked out for more than two days and doesn't remember the interim. And because it's highly unusual not to see or hear from Dee Dee Adams, her younger sister, Tanya, checked in on her. Tanya was gravely afraid, not only because another sister, Rita, had just passed away, but also because Rita wasn't the first. They're from a large family and they've been to a lot of funerals.
She opened the door. She came in. She said she started tearing up crying. She said, I just don't wanna find my sister. I can't lose another sister right now. I won't be able to take it. And she started hollering my name, she said, turning on lights, and she said she heard me from back in the back, and I don't even know how. But I somehow I heard someone calling my name, and all I can say is help me. I get, oh, oh, I get, you know, excuse me. I said help me. I'm here. I'm here. She said I sounded like some little mouse or cartoon character because she could barely make it out, and she said when she got back there and she didn't see me, I had all these covers on top of me. I don't even know how I got them there, but they were. And she said when she pulled the covers back, she broke down. I couldn't tell. I was kinda in and out of consciousness because I was so small. It was number skin and bones.
Tanya called 911, and quickly the house was swarming with emergency responders.
I remember hearing all these people crying. I thought I had died. I really did. And to tell you the truth, I get it now when people say when they're dying, they feel this peace. I was okay. I felt the peace. I was okay. They wheeled me out. I'd never ridden in an ambulance in my whole life. Again, I'd never been sick. They put me in the ambulance, and everybody followed me, them to the hospital. The emergency room doctors, they say my told my sisters. My sisters said they told them that all we know is she is dying, and everything is shutting down. This this this woman has been sick a long time for all of this to happen. Like, they told them, they said they were crying, She has lupus. That's what's wrong. She's got lupus. And they said the doctors told them, doctors told them, no. There's more than lupus wouldn't do this. Not like this.
The doctors checked her over and found that her appendix was leaking, poisoning her body and had been for some time, explaining the nausea and nausea and other symptoms she was experiencing that lupus really couldn't account for.
They also found a tumor about the size of a baseball. I, they took me back upstairs. At that point then, they told my family emergency surgery. We gotta go in now. Again, I've never had surgery and stuff, so I was but, you know, I was okay with it. I told them, and they were crying because my sisters were helping to get me ready and whatever with the nurses and because they had to do this quickly. I told them I was okay. It'll be okay. I had a good life. I started talking about that stuff too, and they said they was like, Lou, stop talking. I said, I had a good life. I lived a good life. I ran the race. I fought the good fight. I can't complain about nothing I've done. They took me to surgery. They removed the toma, and you know how they do. They do that first because they gotta send it to pathology because then they gotta know whether they gotta go in and get some more stuff. Right. Whether it's denied. It was denied. So now they went ahead and removed the appendix, And they sent me home after they got my fever under control, they thought, but within twenty four hours, I was back. That's true. Why? My fever was up over a 106. I couldn't get it down. It went up when they got me home. They found out I had acute I had a serious case of pneumonia, so I was in the hospital again. And it wasn't over yet. I came home, then I ended up back at the hospital a few days later because the cartilage that's connected to my ribs was inflamed, much like kinda like pleurisy. The lupus deal with the pneumonia, it all now started to everything was clashing with each other to recover but not recover.
So energetic Dee Dee Adams had to chill out, had to get some rest, and truly recover. And needless to say, this all put things in perspective. She cried a lot.
Because I thought about my life and how maybe I hadn't worked hard enough, and maybe I hadn't done enough. Somehow within all of that, as they say, self actualization and reflecting, and I never stopped. Now remember this. I never stopped. I never saw the seasons change like other people. I never saw the leaves fall. I never saw flowers bloom. I was passing through life doing things that I thought was right, which were, but I never actually took in life and lived it and breathed it. I never appreciated the sky being blue. I didn't because I was so busy working my ten to twelve hour job, making my money for retirement and all these other things I do. I was a council member making sure I was doing my job, attending all the meetings and doing what I needed to do. But from April to July, my family, sisters, and people that took care of me, because I couldn't be left alone because I couldn't do anything. I couldn't cook. I couldn't wash myself. Couldn't do anything. Couldn't go to the doctor. I had to be cared for twenty four hours a day. I was in that den. I would move from the bed to the den couch, and I would look out the window of my patio. And I got to see spring, and I got to see summer. Sorry. And I realized how I had to just like I try to get people to see now, you got to do it all. You got to have a piece of all of it. You just can't do one part, and that's the part that you do. You gotta be connected to all of it. And it was at that point, I remember what my mother used to tell me. She used to tell me. She said, honey, you never slow down. You're always on the move. You don't take time to smell the roses. You're out here doing all this stuff, but eventually you're gonna stop, and it's not gonna be when you want to. You're gonna stop. I stopped, and I got a chance to see what I had had been missing in light of thinking I was doing everything I needed to do. I was really missing out on the joys of the little things of life.
But she still had a challenge coming up, reelection to the city council that year.
So in order for me to run for office, I had to run, and I had opposition, but I couldn't file. I couldn't even file because I'm here at the house. I can't even hardly walk. And I got into that point and place where I'm old school. I didn't want nobody to see me weak. I was one of those people that I never let people see me sweat, cry. See, I'm sitting here crying in front of you. I never would have done that. I always wanted people to see me as strong, invincible, count on her, she's not gonna binge. In order for me to run for my office, I had to go back to work because the way business works, as you know, I could not be out on medical leave and running for office from John's controls. I had to go back to work. I went back to work. And I remember when I went told my family I was gonna run for office, file for reelection. They didn't like that. But I told them my work wasn't done yet. I had to do this.
But she wasn't a 100% yet. She credits her family and her corps of volunteers with helping to return her to office. They did the advocacy and the door knocking, etcetera.
Didi felt a little bit weird about that. I've never been still. Everybody knows that. That was hard. You be still. We got this, Didi. That's what they said. We got this.
This year, she's unopposed for reelection, and she's energetic as ever with new perspective.
I'm always busy. I never I don't know. Even now with now, I appreciate it more than ever. When I can look out there and I can see the blue sky, when I can play tennis like yesterday and see how blue the sky is, and I can feel how crisp the air is on me, and I can see flowers and life through the dogwoods and the azaleas in the South. I just love it. I just love it. It doesn't stop me. It gives me energy to just keep going. A lot of my young people and people say, god, I wish I had a passion. Didi, your passion is just it's it's tiring. I said, I know. I said, but it's me. It's me. It's just me.
You can read a full story about Dee Dee Adams and the latest issue of Southern City. That's the bimonthly magazine from the North Carolina League of Municipalities. That's online at nclm.0rg. Now a quick word about this podcast. You heard up top that this is the first episode of Municipal Equation. It'll be the first of many. My name is Ben Brown, and my employer is the North Carolina League of Municipalities. That's a membership association of more than 540 hometowns that make this podcast possible. While we hail from North Carolina, we hope this reaches cities and towns across the country because there are most likely a lot of common denominators out there that affect municipalities, and there might be some bright ideas that we can draw from and benefit from across the board. What we're trying to do is create a place of idea sharing, where authors of studies and books that concern municipalities and residents can explain what's happening and what we might do about it, where notable public servants can have their stories told, where we can learn about new tools that can better connect residents to their cities. You get it. That's what this podcast is about. But we still encourage you to listen to a brief supplementary episode that we've posted to our SoundCloud page. That's soundcloud.com/municipalequation. It'll explain a little more about the podcast and how you can get involved. In the meantime, if you have any ideas for this podcast or topics that we need to be covering, please let me know. My name is Ben Brown. You can find me on Twitter at Ben Brown Media, or you can send me an email at bbrown@nclm.org. NCLM stands for North Carolina League of Municipalities. Visit us online at nclm.org. Please keep listening, and please be a part of the municipal equation.
