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It began with her toe. It was 1979, and Casey Caswell Williams '81, a 20-year-old junior sociology major at UNH, thought she had broken it somehow. When she couldn't walk on it—couldn't even stand a bed sheet touching it—she limped to an emergency room. It could be gout, the doctor told her. But when the pain and swelling disappeared, Williams forgot all about it. Until two years later when it happened again.

This time a doctor not only diagnosed gout but chronic kidney failure, a disease, she would later discover, that ran in her family. In chronic kidney failure, the kidneys gradually stop filtering toxins from the body. In the early years, the disease can be asymptomatic, but as the kidneys begin to fail, wide-ranging symptoms appear, such as excessive thirst, weight loss, fatigue, anemia, lethargy, seizures and coma. Ultimately, its victims can die.

Once Williams recovered from the gout, she felt fine. But she worried about what lay ahead, and family and friends tried to offer comfort and advice. Brenda Reagan Ramsdell '81, her best friend and UNH roommate, could sense her unspoken anxiety. Things will work out, Ramsdell told her. Nearly 25 years later, Ramsdell would reassure Williams again. But this time she would do more than offer words of comfort.

The girls had much in common—they both came from blended families, their mothers were both bankers, they had similar tastes in music and books, and their senses of humor clicked. They became inseparable friends throughout school (Williams even pierced Ramsdell's ears for her when they were 17), and, in 1977, they ended up going to UNH together. "At first, we decided not to be roommates," recalls Ramsdell. "We wanted to meet new people and have lots of new experiences. But we lived across the Quad from each other -- I lived in Hitchcock, Casey lived in Randolph -- and we ended up seeing each other almost every day anyway."

During sophomore year, Ramsdell took some time off and went to Europe. When she came back, she and Williams became roommates in an apartment in Dover, N.H. It was Ramsdell who gave Williams the nickname "K.C." from her birth name Katherine Caswell. Eventually the name stuck and became Casey. "Now everybody calls me that, and they have since college," says Williams.

While they were living in Dover, Williams broke her leg in a car accident; Ramsdell took care of her until she was back on her feet again. For most of their 20s and 30s, the two women lived far apart—Williams with her husband in Florida and Ramsdell with her husband, Gary, in New England—but kept in close contact with frequent phone calls and visits to each other's homes. Ramsdell became a schoolteacher, operating her own kindergarten in Barrington, N.H., for 10 years, and eventually teaching in elementary schools in Loudon, Boscawen and Penacook, N.H., while writing a children's book and stories. Williams joined the corporate world as a leadership trainer in Florida and eventually all over New England. In 1998, Williams and her family—which included her husband, Tom, her son, Beau, now 16, and daughter SunMi, now 13—moved back to New Hampshire.

"Over all the years of our friendship we've never had a single serious argument," says Ramsdell. "Our friendship is unconditional; we just know that we can always count on each other."

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