World AIDS Day

[priceyfatprude]

To celebrate, I want you all to do something queer! Ok, that wasn't very PC. But now that I have your attention:

What does this day mean to you, if anything? Everyone's got a million stories in them, anyone got an AIDS story (that you feel like sharing)?

I am off to GBF's house for some Chinese food & Queer As Folk w/him & the ex. I hope I never have to add either of their names to a quilt.

My AIDS story: I have been to Kokomo, IN, former home of Ryan White. It is just as much of a small town as you think it is.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ryan+white

[amanda]

AIDS in the #4 killer in all women 25-44, #1 in African-american women in the same age category.

sadly, it's not just the "gay man's disease" anymore.

[drivinmissdaisy]

I don't have a story, but read a book about Ryan White years ago, it was a very touching story.

[zenbabe]

I am glad I am married.

[Aphrodite]

I have cared for AIDS patients and found them to live in a very misunderstanding world. Everyone, including myself , is afraid of it. No-one wants to catch it. I found myself standing back a little farther, wincing if I touched any bodily fluid, and washing very well when a quick wash probably would have sufficed.
I caught myself feeling fear when I touched a sweaty brow, and was thoroughly disgusted by my own irrational reaction. I realized that it was up to me to educate myself. Universal precautions are in place for a reason. This patient is no different from anyone else with a disease. This patient is a person, like everyone else.
I got over my initial fears and armed with research and understanding of the disease, I provided the best care I was able to. It is all I can do.

[Audreyvgs]

The day means I get to remember CB Hopkins, who was like a brother. He would come out to the farm, mow the lawn just to smell it, and say naked on the deck upstairs with a towel over the rail, so he could tan "Scooter and the Twins" and my friend Reuben, who was a most beautiful man with piercing brown eyes and a huge black moustache, who's family owns the feed store that now owns us....we fought over who actually owned the fruit that fell off a tree I was buying from him once, it had smashed in the driveway of his Nursery, and we were both eating it off the gravel, it was so good...i said, hey! this is MY tree! and he said, Hell, no! It's mine! You haven't paid for it yet! and then this other time I was over there, I said WHAT? too many times, so I watched as he rolled the edges of a paper feedsack down, and actually stood there in stunned silence as he stuck it on my head, grabbed my face, and pulled me up about 6" so that the paper bag went FWAPFWAPFWAP into a ceiling fan.....at the same time he yelled: "GET A ****ING BELTONE!"

CB moved to Atlanta, and I saw him a few months before he died, and he actually got to meet the Bink, and I was so glad. I hugged him like I'd never see him again. I hugged him so long when I said goodbye that he was wondering if I was nuts.

The only way I found out about CB was that a day or two later, somebody hit reply all, on CB's aol account friends list, probably by accident. It said something about what a wonderful person CB was. I knew.

Reuben has a brother, who is also gay, and he is, quite possibly one of the most handsome men I have ever met. I've been friends with the whole family for years, and Rufino is now the recipient of all the love I felt for them both. Poor son of a bitch, he now has feedsack duty. (those wild Cubans might be mean, but for many years ran a tab for us for all the food for these pigs we own, canine, equine, porcine and avian.) We couldnt have done it without the love and support of their family.

[trisherina]

I first met Jake (not his real name) when I walked into his private (isolation) room late one evening to find his IV trailing on the floor. He was in the bathroom with cramps and diarrhea; the urgency was so bad that he was almost caught short, and he'd disconnected the IV forcibly in flight. The room was a mess, blood and saline everywhere, and all the hazardous material/linen bags (this being inpatient Psychiatry, not a medical unit) were stuffed well past overflowing. Somehow, everything got cleaned up and put back together.

Jake was on Psychiatry to die because he had a pre-existing bipolar condition, and a kind psychiatrist who wanted to see him receive good care in a room of his own at the end.

A couple of days before his death, he shaved off his eyebrows. People kept asking him why, and he'd do a Bette Davis: "Because I can do any thing I want!!" His was the first AIDS death I saw. That was in 1988.

[madasacutsnake]

I remember taking blood from a dying AIDS patient. I said, "Just a little prick", he said "That's what got me into this trouble in the first place".

[sparticle]

I worked at Methodist Hospital in Houston in the days before it was fully understood what AIDS was or how it functioned.

One of my co-workers was a gay man who became suddenly, frequently ill with flulike symptoms and finally pneumonia. AIDS was suspected but nobody knew what it was. He became a patient at the hospital where we worked. Everybody was terrified to go near him. Nurses and aides wore plastic gloves and masks even to bring him his meals and meds, and everyone hurried out of the room. It was 1982 and everyone was terrified of this THING. People who had it became the THING by extension.

I walked into his room and hugged him and I didn't care. He was my friend. Nothing I had read or heard indicated that I was at risk from giving him a hug and so I did.

It was so little it was nothing, but I have never forgotten him and I have always been grateful that grace overcame fear, if only for a moment. He was the first person I have known who died of AIDS but I am sorry to say he was not the last. God rest his gentle soul.

[Willow Sylph]

I love this thread. It makes me feel the value in my own life and helps me remember that there is a real human being behind the illness (not that I don't see a person with aids as human. I mean that people with aids seem to end up being identified by others by what they have - not by who they are) Thank you, Pricey.

[bealeblues]

no AIDS story, but CF killed my best friend 10 years ago

[Deviate]

Originally posted by amanda
AIDS in the #4 killer in all women 25-44, #1 in African-american women in the same age category.

sadly, it's not just the "gay man's disease" anymore.

that's a blessing and the curse.

oh, and hopefully when i get done at my Night of 1000 Stars black tie event, PFP, i will be, in fact, be doing someone queer.

[priceyfatprude]

Originally posted by Deviate
oh, and hopefully when i get done at my Night of 1000 Stars black tie event, PFP, i will be, in fact, be doing someone queer.

Excellent.