We are studying lymphatics and immunity in my anatomy and physiology 2. For extra credit, we watched a movie called "And the Band Played On". It was about the AIDS epidemic and the doctors from the CDC as well as the French scientists and doctors trying to figure out what was killing gay men, hemophiliacs, and others.
I learned about things like bath houses, the retrovirus topic, patient zero. Forgive me for sounding a bit "sheltered". I just never knew about the bath house topic but then again, I was born in 1988. :)
My mom was a restaurant manager at the time and even lost some of her employees/dear friends to AIDS. It truly was saddening to read about how these people lost their lives and how initially no one knew why. Anyhow, I'm sure many of you were nurses in the 80's when AIDS was such a mysterious crisis. If you were a nurse in the 80's, please chime in. Being in the medical field, what was it like? Were you afraid of getting this mystery disease? I read that there were some healthcare workers who refused to care for anyone with "gay cancer". Watching this movie got me thinking. It was fascinating to research AIDS from a cultural and scientific perspective. Things definitely have shifted in a different direction.
You've heard us old-timers talk about the 'days before they gave us gloves' to clean up messes? The AIDS epidemic was what got us gloves. AIDS is what got us needle-less devices. AIDS is what got us universal precautions.
This. My first Ex had been a Paramedic for a long time, he came up in the days when you hadn't had a good shift unless your uniform shirt was soaked with blood. He and most of his cohorts had a horrible time re-learning how to start IV's with gloves on. My EMT and Paramedic training came 1988 through 1990 so the medical community knew more about it, and my cohort and I learned how to do everything with gloves on. Except manipulate tape... if anyone ever figures that one out, please let me know!!
And to add on to what meanmaryjean said about the lack of knowledge - remember that the ONE thing we DID know from VERY early on was that it was a death sentence. There was absolutely nothing that could be done but manage the symptoms and watch the patient waste away. It was freakin' scary.
I was just a teen during the early days of the aids epidemic but I had a personal experience with it during that time. My cousin who passed away in 1989 died of aids and the horrible treatment he received still makes me sick. He went back home to live with his mom from Dallas. She lived in a small town in northwest arkansas and the doctors and hospitals in that area refused him any treatment basically told him hospice care and wait to die. No hospice type agency would take him. When he would get sick he would have to be driven to Tulsa because no ambulance would take him. Heck when he died he also had to be cremated in Tulsa because no one in arkansas would do it. People even complained about him having a headstone in their cemetery.
This just breaks my heart. It pains me to even read about how these people were treated. This wasn't about fear of AIDS. This was just staight up hate. I am so sorry your cousin was treated like this. That is unacceptable and horrifying to me. (((hugs)))
I am too young to have been a nurse back in the 80's, but have two stories from family with personal involvement.
My great uncle died of the disease in a larger town in the Midwest,sometime in the 80's (I'm guessing earlier than later, because I don't remember this event, and I graduated from high school in 90). He was in isolation the entire time he was in the hospital, and no visitors under age 18 were allowed. My parents did not ever tell me about it, I didn't know this until I saw Dallas Buyers Club, was commenting to a family member about how the AIDS pts were treated, and they filled me in.
my great aunt (other side of the family), was an ER nurse when the AIDS epidemic started to hit. She retired at that time (and since I think she would have been in her 70's, it was probably about time!). While the AIDS epidemic is why she retired, it's not the reason you would suspect. As previously mentioned, AIDS brought us gloves. My aunt was horrified by the thought that she had to wear gloves when touching someone. She considered it cold and uncaring. She did not want to abide by Universal Precautions, and therefore left rather than wear gloves. When I visited her in the nursing home and told her I wanted to be a nurse, she came alive, and ranted for a decent amount of time about how the profession has changed for the worse, now that we nurses have to wear gloves! She just could not wrap her mind around how you could really care for someone and wear gloves.
I was in nursing school in the early 80's and when I look back at a few of my patients, I have to wonder if they were HIV positive and converted. Most men did not come out and say they were gay back then.
I do remember getting our first baby from a mom who had converted to AIDS. There were some that didn't want to care for the infant and we were on strict isolation with him. Back then, we didn't use universal precautions so this was a big deal. Very sad .
Elkpark, I am truly thankful you were working at that hospital so that you could give that man the care he needed and deserved. For him to be so gracious despite the fact that he was dying and had only one staff member treat him like a human speaks volumes of this man. I can't imagine why this behavior was tolerated either.
my great aunt (other side of the family), was an ER nurse when the AIDS epidemic started to hit. She retired at that time (and since I think she would have been in her 70's, it was probably about time!). While the AIDS epidemic is why she retired, it's not the reason you would suspect. As previously mentioned, AIDS brought us gloves. My aunt was horrified by the thought that she had to wear gloves when touching someone. She considered it cold and uncaring. She did not want to abide by Universal Precautions, and therefore left rather than wear gloves. When I visited her in the nursing home and told her I wanted to be a nurse, she came alive, and ranted for a decent amount of time about how the profession has changed for the worse, now that we nurses have to wear gloves! She just could not wrap her mind around how you could really care for someone and wear gloves.
I agree with your great-aunt. While I'm younger than her, I trained and was practicing back before we wore gloves for anything other than specific infection precautions, sterile procedures, and really gross/dirty tasks (like cleaning out poopy bedpans). I still wear them as little as possible; since I work in psych, that ends up being rarely.
I posted some of this on another thread last year.
I'm old enough that I worked ICU when the AIDS epidemic was just beginning, and I was in the San Francisco-Seattle axis where we had a lot of gay patients anyway. Remember, too, that the gay community was fabulously supportive of community in general, always turned out in large numbers for blood drives. A few years later I thought back to all the blood I had slopped around in from the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank in SF when I worked ICU-- think open heart surgery, GI bleeds, multitrauma...
We had a unit clerk who was a photographer and came home from a trip to NYC not feeling well, He never really got better, said his docs thought he had some sort of leukemia but they had no idea what it was. He died. I had many gay friends, and it seemed like every other one of them was sickening and dying and nobody knew why. Until we did.
Universal precautions came out. We knew how the disease was transmitted and how to avoid exposure. That was the easy part for me, but I couldn't understand why it was so hard to understand for so many others.
I must say that it was a time when I was not proud of a lot of my colleagues. I would take my patient assignment of some poor man with what was then a fatal pneumocystis pneumonia (thank god we have better treatment now) and soon a fearful face would peek around the door with the unspoken question: Would this nurse let me in to see my lover who is dying? So many wouldn't, would shoo them away saying, "Family only!" as if the patient would have any family members who would even acknowledge his existence; I never met one who did. It absolutely broke my heart. "Please come in," I would say. "I'm sure he'd be so happy to have you here. Would you like to help me bathe him?" "Can I?" "Of course you can, I'm sure he'd prefer you to me at this point!" The tenderness between these guys was indescribable. And we would all cry.
I had one experience, among so many, that was particularly heartbreaking. I was floated to a general surgery floor for a coupla summer days and for some reason we had a man with pulmonary failure on the "hot" side of the house, where the sun just baked the rooms all afternoon and no amount of air-conditioning would keep up with it. He wasn't my patient but I covered him when his nurse went to lunch, and his light went on. "Hey, Jen's at lunch. I'm GrnTea, what can I do for you?" He was lying in bed with the oxygen on, sweating and breathing with difficulty, and he said, "I'm just so hot. Can you help me?" So I got a basin of ice chips and alcohol (remember that? We did that before we had cooling blankets) and some washcloths and started to swab him down. And he started to cry. I stopped, startled, said, "What? What? Am I hurting you?" and he wept and wept and said (and this is where I start to cry now and every time I think of this story, thirty years later), "Nobody has touched me for three weeks." That poor man, in the hospital sick as a dog and knowing he was probably going to die very soon, and not one nurse had helped him bathe or eat or turn as he got weaker and weaker. It broke my heart.
The next day I went in and asked to care for him again. He had been found dead on the floor of his room, having taken off his oxygen to go to the bathroom, probably because he thought nobody would answer his light, and probably desaturated enough to pass out. And they didn't find him until change of shift because nobody looked in on him all night.
And this was at the hospital where universal precautions, now called standard precautions, began. Not everybody seemed to believe in them, though. I was engaged and learned not to tell my beloved about my day at work because he was so afraid I would be exposed and he would lose me. Later I was able to explain blood and body fluid precautions to him in a way he understood, but it was a tough sell.
I haven't seen the movie but I have the book by Randy Shilts, and was living in the Bay Area when he wrote it. He died. If you write a book about nursing in the AIDS epidemic years, I would like to read it.
Yep, remember it well. We wore 'space suits' to care for AIDS patients in the early 80's... We had giant sealable bags for transporting deceased patients to a special area in the morgue. I don't harbor any blame for people who were afraid to approach or touch - - - we had no idea how it was transmitted and no one wanted to die or take it home to their family. But I honestly don't remember anyone who commented/believed that it was a 'gay scourge' rather than a terrible new disease that we just didn't know anything about yet.
Specializes in Oncology; medical specialty website.
I was in my last year of nursing school when the first AIDS patient came to the hospital where I was doing my training. I remember being on the med-surg floor where this patient had been admitted, and I watched the nurse garb up from head to toe, looking as someone else mentioned, like she was wearing a space suit. We students were not allowed anywhere near that patient.
My first job after school was on a psych unit. There was one phone by the nurses' station for the patients to share. We got a young woman who had, what they used to call, HTLV. Our nurse manager decided that we were to watch her in case she used the phone. If she did, we were to immediately wipe it down with alcohol as soon as she finished using it. I often wondered what she must have felt like, seeing staff running over to the phone, scrubbing it down as if she'd had plague.
I can't imagine being in the hospital and not having one kind touch from someone, especially a nurse Thank goodness many had a kind heart and stood for one of the things that makes a good nurse...the gift of therapeutic touch. Kindness goes a long way.
I was in my last year of nursing school when the first AIDS patient came to the hospital where I was doing my training. I remember being on the med-surg floor where this patient had been admitted, and I watched the nurse garb up from head to toe, looking as someone else mentioned, like she was wearing a space suit. We students were not allowed anywhere near that patient.
My first job after school was on a psych unit. There was one phone by the nurses' station for the patients to share. We got a young woman who had, what they used to call, HTLV. Our nurse manager decided that we were to watch her in case she used the phone. If she did, we were to immediately wipe it down with alcohol as soon as she finished using it. I often wondered what she must have felt like, seeing staff running over to the phone, scrubbing it down as if she'd had plague.
I remember it being called HTLV and HTLV-3! I had a hard time with 'HIV' and 'AIDS' when the powers-that-be finally settled on nomenclature.
Specializes in OR, Nursing Professional Development.
Yep, remember it well. We wore 'space suits' to care for AIDS patients in the early 80's... We had giant sealable bags for transporting deceased patients to a special area in the morgue. I don't harbor any blame for people who were afraid to approach or touch - - - we had no idea how it was transmitted and no one wanted to die or take it home to their family. But I honestly don't remember anyone who commented/believed that it was a 'gay scourge' rather than a terrible new disease that we just didn't know anything about yet.
Thank God we don't have to go there again.
I was only born in the 80s, so I basically have no personal knowledge of the AIDS epidemic. However, sadly, there are still nurses out there who don't understand universal precautions, and I'm talking nurses who went to school after they were created. A nurse who used to work with me was assigned to a surgery; the patient happened to be HIV+. So how does she get ready to go out and interview him? She puts on a space suit that we use for total joint surgeries (and this was most definitely not a total joint-they are done elsewhere), knee high waterproof shoe/leg covers, and several layers of gloves. I cannot even imagine how that patient felt when she arrived in his room. What's even sadder is that she was never called on it by management- no write up, no further education.
Thank goodness many had a kind heart and stood for one of the things that makes a good nurse...the gift of therapeutic touch. Kindness goes a long way.
theantichick
320 Posts
This. My first Ex had been a Paramedic for a long time, he came up in the days when you hadn't had a good shift unless your uniform shirt was soaked with blood. He and most of his cohorts had a horrible time re-learning how to start IV's with gloves on. My EMT and Paramedic training came 1988 through 1990 so the medical community knew more about it, and my cohort and I learned how to do everything with gloves on. Except manipulate tape... if anyone ever figures that one out, please let me know!!
And to add on to what meanmaryjean said about the lack of knowledge - remember that the ONE thing we DID know from VERY early on was that it was a death sentence. There was absolutely nothing that could be done but manage the symptoms and watch the patient waste away. It was freakin' scary.