Free Ryan White - My Own Story by Ryan & Cunningham White

treats only kids, they’re used to hard cases like me—or even worse. They’ll literally try anything to get a sick kid to eat. They’ll let you cook your own food, or if you won’t touch anything but Frosted Flakes or hot dogs, you can get them, three times a day.
    I wasn’t that extreme, but still, there were days when my mouth and throat were simply too sore, or when I just didn’t feel like eating. Sometimes I couldn’t sit up, so I’d use that as an excuse. Then Laura would tell me, “You act like a kid—I’m going to treat you like a kid. Choo, choo—here comes the train!”—and she’d zoom a spoonful of vegetables into my mouth. Sometimes I’d manage to duck in time—and then there’d be peas all over my bed.
    Laura never talked to me about dying. She figured Dr. Kleiman’s job was to keep me up-to-date about life-and-death medical matters. Hers was mainly to give me as good a time as possible. She always volunteered to be assigned to me, and after word got around the hospital about what was wrong with me, that was important. AIDS was so new that even some people who worked in medicine were nervous. Some nurses found excuses to avoid caring for me: They said they had colds and didn’t want to infect me. Some just asked for other assignments. But others weren’t so subtle. Mom overhead one nurse telling a doctor, “I don’t want to go near him, and I don’t see why I have to.”
    Much as I hated having my finger stuck for a blood sample, I always tried to help the nurses by sitting very still, breathing deep and slow to stay calm. I’d ask them to say, “One, two, three—stick!” so I could get ready. Sometimes you can be so afraid of being stuck that all the veins in your arm disappear completely! When that happens, the nurse’s job is much harder and the whole awful process takes ten times longer. The nurse or technician would tell me, “I don’t want to hurt you.”
    Since I knew perfectly well they were going to, I just said, “Don’t worry about it.”
    I wondered if they were really saying that they were worried about getting hurt themselves. Much later I found out that one nurse who had been drawing my blood had stuck herself with the same needle right afterward. She was just about to get married, so she asked her fiancé if he wanted to call off the wedding. He didn’t; she got tested for AIDS, and her test was negative. If you’ve been infected, you’ll test positive within three months, though you may not show any symptoms for up to eight years.
    Once I asked Laura why she wasn’t scared of me.
    “About the only precaution I have to take with an AIDS patient is to wear rubber gloves when I might touch your blood,” Laura told me. “That’s in case I have any cuts on my hands. Besides, I think my job is to treat every patient like they’re an AIDS patient. If I do my job like I’m supposed to—wear gloves when I should, scrub down, and wash up well—then I don’t have to be scared. If I’m not scared, then my hands won’t shake when I draw your blood. That’s how things can go wrong and you could stab yourself with an infected needle.”
    Sometimes the hospital staff wanted to stay away from me—not because of AIDS, but because I was ornery. When you’re really sick, you often don’t realize you’re being crabby. My uncle Tommy found out about this when he had bad cancer for a while. One day my aunt Janet called him from Birmingham and started chatting about how the last I.U. basketball game had gone. Uncle Tommy, who’s unbelievably patient—you know he has to be because he lives with my cousins—just about took her head off over the phone.
    “You’re being ridiculous ,” he insisted to Janet. “The game wasn’t like that at all.”
    Janet was taken aback. Tommy’s always so mild-mannered. “Well, Tommy,” she said finally, “if I’d known you felt so strongly, I wouldn’t have said anything.”
    Then Tommy could hear how he’d sounded to her,