Can We Conquer the Last Mile?

Can We Conquer the Last Mile...?

With all the new flus, viruses, fungus' and such, I will say, I think we can conquer AIDS/HIV. We seem to forget or want to forget that AIDS/HIV is still ongoing.

I remember when people were dying from an unknown virus. The stigma still hangs in the balance. I've known, and eventually treated children and adults with AIDS or who were HIV positive.

I actually have been trained in AIDS/HIV more than oncology. I understood the pitfalls of cancer research and fundraising. It was disheartening. But AIDS/HIV research and fund raising had a clearer more progressive approach.

I also knew that I was unafraid of the virus. I knew to touch the infected. It was and is imperative for their survival, as well those around them and society.

In the 1990s as I walked down a city hospital hallway where pediatric AIDS outpatients existed. I was scolded for not wearing gloves by a nurse I'd never met before nor after. She witnessed me sitting with a crying child with AIDS on my lap, before his pick-line was to be renewed.

I realized tears and urine would not give me AIDS. She with all her earlier medical education was still responding as if we were in the early to mid 1980s.

My husband and I had been reading up on it since the early to mid-1980s. We realized the masses wouldn't handle this well, neither socially neither psychologically. It was before either one of us knew anyone who had this unknown virus.

Before I started my therapy business, I worked in the accounting and financial fields. Yet, I and my husband were into the sciences. He more into the absolutes. Myself more on the outer limits. He'd point out three decades into our marriage that I was the 'what if?' in the marriage.

I was told that Magic Johnson had it, before it was publicly announced. I was stunned at first. Then not.

The few people outside of medicine I spoke with in the 1990s still believed it was only going to effect someone they didn't know. I told one quite religious man, "It's coming to a theater near you... That's the truth." Two years later he called my home phone, crestfallen. It had hit close to home for him. It shook his belief system.

I gently explained, 'No one is to be condemned. When you condemn without understanding you undermine science. You undermine our very existence. So now you understand condemnation without understanding is illogical. Too, certainly not helpful. And it is painful.' Then we prayed together on the phone for the people he knew.---Jody-Lynn Reicher

Comments

Completion of Humanness

Completion of Humanness As we arrive to the completion of the first year without Norman, I had decided long before he'd passed that I would continue to do things certain things he liked yet could no longer do. I decided I would not take a day off of fitness. I would run at least for 500 days in a row. I began that in early 2020. I'd not be concerned with the distance I'd run. It was the very thing I convinced Norman and the thing that mattered to him, from the very first discussion we had August 11th, 1981, was fitness. I loved that he was a College Boy. He loved that I was a Marine. We tickled each other's soul with such admirations. Later fitness continued as an old discussion from 1994 ...getting outside and to run no matter what. I would say to him, "Run 200 meters, then 400 meters. If it doesn't feel good, stop. Turn around and walk back home and know you did your best. That is all you can ask of yourself." I said this, knowing he would get dow

In My World

As I finish putting away the week's groceries, I contemplate other's lives. Aside from my two daughters, I consider what may be other's lives. How they have conducted their lives over the past two years. This is a thought not unusual for me to have. Yet, it occurs more often than not. Especially now, as the population is probably feeling ever more irked. Regarding perhaps. their illusion of any lack of their freedom. But isn't that what life is about? The illusion of who we are. What we are about. Where we stand on the planet. Who we love. And who loves us. Our significance. Couldn't we imagine if this were all just an illusion? Sounds like a "Twighlight Zone" episode, perhaps. My aim here, are the thoughts of reckoning. I'll explain why I'm claiming such a thing. For about twenty-eight years of a career in dealing with injured athletes, pain patients, chronically ill and the terminally ill. I found that there were many people who lied to

It's About the Soul And...

...perhaps the soles of our shoes. My father-in-law used to say the feet are what soldiers depend on, as we do food. He said that to me in 1985 as I stood in his home office. My husband, Norman was a shoe guy. And it was all about the soles on the shoes. For me, the way I have stayed on my feet was soul deep. Sometimes praying every step of the way, to not fall over out of exhaustion. The approximately 170,000 miles of running, many of which Norman had witnessed or known of. He wondered how I stayed standing working on my feet all day. Only to come home, and go for a second run at midnight at times. Often Norman would give me a lecture on good shoe care. It was about the soles of the shoes. He'd point out stitching on a shoe that was done wrong. Therefore commenting, "...giving a shoe less time of wear on this earth." He'd remark quite often. "You have to buy good quality shoes." I have to say, there was absolutely something comedic about his shoe obse

Writing Reality

Search This Blog