The Years of Plague and Love Part One

“But what does it mean, the plague? It's life, that's all.” 
― Albert Camus, The Plague



I graduated from nursing school in 1982. In San Francisco. I lived in the Castro District and worked at a "gay" restaurant while I was in school. Many of my friends were gay. Many. Most of my clinical rotations were at San Francisco General, UCSF and Kaiser, all hospitals with active Infectious Disease Units and I gravitated to them for doing my in-depth work. A new disease was being seen more and more often and it was hitting people I knew. No one was really sure what it was, but most people called it GRID, Gay Related Immune Deficiency.

Halloween at The Sausage Factory, Castro Street,1981

 I remember the first patient I cared for with GRID He was a 22 year old skinny African-American man, gay, and had a disease of old Jewish men, Kaposi's Sarcoma, a cancer which coloured his mocha skin in deep purple splotches. He also had a respiratory disease called PCP, a fungal disease usually found in chemo patients or other immune compromised people. He looked very tiny in the hospital bed, And very scared. His caregivers, the nurses and other hospital workers, including me, wore isolation gowns, gloves, and if we chose to, masks. I rarely wore a mask, I knew my chances of getting PCP were beyond slim- I was a healthy young woman.
One day he was visited by a rather well-known SF community leader and his entourage. It was a photo op. They asked me what they should wear in the room. I told them the options, knowing that they would be on the far side of the room from him, I suggested a gown, gloves if they had open cuts, and that a mask was not required. They chose to do compete isolation garb. It was their choice. I held the young man's hand , gloveless, not because I was saintly, not because I was crazy, but because that small man was going to die very soon and to feel that alone and unwanted must be a very terrible feeling.
Rumours were already spreading through the Castro , down Folsom Street, Polk Street that there was a disease that you could get from gay men. Some people said it was only from the street gays or in the bath houses or promiscuous guys- of course what other kind was there?

Nursing School Graduation