By Dr. Kate Scannell
First Published: March 24, 2011
My 20-year old patient had been suffering a slow, painful death expected to occur within the next few days. Alone in his drab room on a county hospital’s AIDS ward in California in the mid-1980s, he had been praying to see his father and mother one final time. He fantasized about them rushing into the hospital, assembling around his deathbed, holding his hands and easing his transition from this world.
He had last seen his parents several years before at the family homestead in the rural south. Standing on the front porch where he had been exiled moments after admitting his homosexuality, he saw his father’s angry face behind the slamming screen door, his mother’s piercing stare through the front window.
But, in the end, he carried those final imagesof his parents to his grave. Neither of them had responded to his pleas for a bedside visit, accepted offers of airfare to California gifted by an AIDS advocacy group, or taken opportunities to speak with their son by phone.
And yet, days before he died, he had the experience of “being saved” by Elizabeth Taylor. He had seen her on television, witnessed her embrace of a gay man with AIDS, and heard her unflinching support for AIDS research to seek cures for people who suffered with HIV infections.
Without first-hand experience of the early AIDS epidemic, it may be difficult now to appreciate Elizabeth Taylor’s heroism back then. Read More
First Published: March 24, 2011
My 20-year old patient had been suffering a slow, painful death expected to occur within the next few days. Alone in his drab room on a county hospital’s AIDS ward in California in the mid-1980s, he had been praying to see his father and mother one final time. He fantasized about them rushing into the hospital, assembling around his deathbed, holding his hands and easing his transition from this world.
He had last seen his parents several years before at the family homestead in the rural south. Standing on the front porch where he had been exiled moments after admitting his homosexuality, he saw his father’s angry face behind the slamming screen door, his mother’s piercing stare through the front window.
But, in the end, he carried those final imagesof his parents to his grave. Neither of them had responded to his pleas for a bedside visit, accepted offers of airfare to California gifted by an AIDS advocacy group, or taken opportunities to speak with their son by phone.
And yet, days before he died, he had the experience of “being saved” by Elizabeth Taylor. He had seen her on television, witnessed her embrace of a gay man with AIDS, and heard her unflinching support for AIDS research to seek cures for people who suffered with HIV infections.
Without first-hand experience of the early AIDS epidemic, it may be difficult now to appreciate Elizabeth Taylor’s heroism back then. Read More