All Nurses Have Stories....

...................................... Okay...so for 3 weeks I have been working a Temp job that I very much hope will last........it is with HIV and AIDS ......I took care of my first AIDS patient in 1982 in Baltimore....I was a nursing student working weekends as a Nursing Assistant on an Oncology floor....and he was a young airlines steward whose young body was ravaged so quickly and he was so alone in isolation with sad blue eyes ...he kept saying over and over "Why ? Why? " That one question haunted me...even while working PEDS in New England a few years later I never forgot him...and then by late 80's I was in Seattle helping set up First AIDS Hospice in the Country in an old battered house..that was my favorite job in many ways.....and I was also working ER making sure to get people tested....and then even teaching HIV classes and Caregiver classes...and training other people to do testings.....getting kicked out of a highschool class teaching because I brought bananas and cucumbers and condoms to really teach them.....sigh.....and battling with the Seattle PD WHY a Needle Exchange would help protect people's health ...and why giving the Working Girls condoms mattered....and picking up our little table and moving it down the block from the Pike Street market and cursing those cops...and then setting up Hospice and nursing care and infusion therapy at home for patients and friends too... for many many more through the nineties ....and on and on....this one disease has really in so many ways transformed me as a Nurse....but also as a person...it has horrified me..haunted me...it has made me read and research at all hours.....it has made me get up at 5am to make sure people got their care.....NYC still all of these years later has the highest HIV and AIDS rates in the country...and on and on the story goes....All Nurses have stories...