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

and he apologized. After that he always knew that lots of times I couldn’t hear how I talked to people, either. Laura understood that too, but she never let me get away with bad behavior.
    Sometimes I was scared and upset, and it came out in tears. I never cried in front of anyone at Riley—not even Dr. Kleiman or Laura—only when I was with Mom. Other times I didn’t cry; I got mad. Once Laura happened to walk in while I was being really mean to Mom, who was visiting with Andrea.
    “Ryan,” Laura said firmly, “we don’t cuss in here. You’re not going to talk to your mom like that in front of me.”
    “I’m sorry, Mom,” I said. “I love you.” Whenever we had a fight, I told her that right afterward and kissed her. “I’m sorry, Laura. I didn’t mean it.”
    Just then I felt a wriggling under my blanket. I remembered I might be in real trouble with Laura. Herbie, my hamster, poked his head out and then the rest of him. He started climbing up and down my legs and all over my bed. Good old Andrea had smuggled him into the hospital in a doll’s suitcase. He seemed just as excited to see me as I was to see him.
    Laura looked at Herbie for a minute, and then started smiling up one side of her face. “You better not let Dr. Kleiman see him,” she told me. “I’m not getting into trouble on this one.”
    Still, she must have gotten a kick out of Herbie’s visit, because she told all the other nurses about him. Several of them dropped by and asked to be introduced. I wasn’t expelled from Riley after all.
    Mom didn’t say much when I had my outbursts. She knew what was really bothering me. Sometimes I got so I just told her flat out, “Mom, I’m scared.”
    “I know,” Mom said. “I’m scared too, but we can’t dwell on it.”
    When I was diagnosed, the hospital had suggested family counseling, but Mom and I figured we had each other to talk to. Andrea was like me: She didn’t think I was really going to die. Besides, I didn’t want to talk about AIDS; I just wanted to get on with the rest of my life.
    This may sound hard to believe, but after a while, things changed and I really, truly wasn’t scared of dying. A big reason was that one night in the hospital, when I was off the respirator but still very sick, I had an amazing dream. I thought I was making my way through blackness. The devil was all around, trying to pull me into his house of hell. But I just kept straining and reaching and pulling away from him—when suddenly I saw a blaze of the brightest light you can imagine. God was there. He spoke to me. He said I had nothing to worry about. He was going to take care of me.
    The next day when Mom came to see me, I told her about it. She said she’d heard other sick people say that they’d had a dream like mine. Suddenly I knew what I’d dreamt about.
    “Mom,” I said, “I’ve seen heaven. I’m not afraid now.”
    “What did God look like?” Mom asked me.
    I thought for a moment. “Well,” I said slowly, “He sure didn’t look like that person in the picture I have on my bedroom wall.” I meant Jesus with long hair and a beard.
    T HERE WAS another reason I wasn’t afraid: I was getting better. Hemophilia had taught me I was always going to have to go for it—to concentrate on all the things I wanted to do. Mom had taught me to look for the happy parts of life, and to look away from the bad parts. If I had started dwelling on all the bad stuff connected with hemophilia, I’d never have left the hospital at all. I didn’t want to have AIDS. I wanted to fight it. I wasn’t going to be an AIDS victim. No one was going to make any kind of victim out of me.
    When I got to high school, I learned in psychology class about voodoo, how if you believe in it, it will work on you and for you. If you think zombies and hexes and spirits are dumb, voodoo won’t work. I didn’t know about this when I was lying in the hospital, hearing for the first time that I had AIDS, but somehow I