Over six years ago, I stood at the edge of my uncle’s bed and watched him slowly deteriorate from a loving father to mere skeleton. Spotted with brown lesions and almost bald as a side effect of AZT, he was dying from complications associated with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).
For eight years he was married with only one sexual partner. He had two beautiful children and lived a comfortable life as a foreman. He was not a wild person. If anything, he was known for being extremely passive.
In the mid ‘80s, his son Christopher died. His life and marriage began to shatter. By 1987, he was divorced and traveled around the world. While abroad he had unprotected sex and contracted HIV.
Two years later, he began suffering from extreme headaches and nausea. His doctors admitted him into Kaiser Permanante Hospital in Hollywood believing he had a tumor. Like many patients in the late stages of AIDS, brain polyps develop and are often mistaken for tumors on CAT scans.
After what was supposed to be an operation to remove the tumor, the doctors came into a room filled with his family and said he was in the advanced stages of AIDS.
We wondered how he could have contracted the disease. We ran his past three years through our minds. We tried to imagine when he might have contracted the disease.
Over the next six months, he lived under the care of nuns at a Catholic hospice. It was during this time he told us about his past. We realized it did not make a difference. It did not make a difference if he had sex with one person or a million, all that mattered was he was dying of a disease which any person can catch just by having sex one time.
According to the March 30 issue of the Los Angeles Times, there have been 18,066 AIDS-related deaths in Los Angeles County since 1981.
Those are people who contracted AIDS through intravenous drug use. Those are people who contracted it through homosexual activity. Those are people who contracted it through heterosexual relations. That number includes children born with it. It includes any person whose dentist inadvertently gave him or her the disease.
No matter how they contracted it, they all died from complications from AIDS. None of these people asked for it, they merely were the unfortunate ones who died from a disease whose social taboos sometimes seem more dangerous than the medical complications associated with it.
The problem with AIDS is that there will always be those people who believe that people who contract the disease through unprotected sex deserve to die. But they have the right to live just as any other person does.
My uncle did not deserve to die. Plenty of people have unprotected sex. My parents did and I am the result of it. Some people believe you should have sex only with one person in a monogamous relationship, but even that is not safe. We need to wake up to AIDS, because anyone can contract it.
After a good friend tested a false positive did not question her morals. I hated the disease, but I realized that if she could get AIDS, we all can.
Those who are HIV-positive must live with remarks by ignorant people all the time. People will question their behavior and say the reason they are dying is their own fault.
I hate AIDS. I hate what it has done to my family. I wish my uncle was still alive. I wish he had not had unprotected sex, but he did. I never doubt my love toward him.
But even more than AIDS itself, I hate people who are ignorant about it. The fastest-growing group of AIDS patients is young adults, and even though more of us die in car accidents, the rate of young adults with AIDS is skyrocketing.
We cannot point fingers and passively wait for this disease to go away. It has been six years since my uncle died and AIDS is still here. We need to start finding answers.
