Her Own Flesh and Blood - Features - Atlanta Magazine: Twenty years ago, the young man would’ve left this office with a different prognosis. He would not have left the clinic with a crumpled paper bag full of any number of almost thirty medications that could prolong his life, thanks in part to the Ryan White CARE Act. Lest anyone forget, there was a time when there wasn’t any medication, a time when a generation of young men like this one were diagnosed and then died quickly thereafter, painfully, sometimes with no one by their side. There was a time when Ryan White was a ghost of a little boy with weary eyes who wasn’t allowed to go to school because the people in his Indiana town were terrified that he could kill the other children by taking a drink from a water fountain; a time when HIV wasn’t just some chronic disease, because it chronically left everyone dead in its wake. No, this young man, tall and fit, wearing sneakers with no laces, would not have left this office with a smile, as he readies to stand now, in this new age; he would’ve left with nothing but the horrific clarity of what awaited him.
This is a story about then and now.
“Thank God we have these meds,” she tells him. “Years ago, everyone was dying.”
He looks at her and has no idea.
He puts on his headphones and walks out the door.