Read Ryan White - My Own Story for Free Online Page B

complaining about chest pains and having trouble breathing. He was sweating something awful, and he was going kind of gray in the face. He couldn’t imagine what was wrong with him. Seemed pretty obvious to me, and it turned out I was right. He got to the hospital, had a big operation on his heart, and he’s been okay since.
    That summer Mom didn’t read the papers or turn on the news much. That was before we were on it all the time! Mom was like everyone else in Kokomo: She chatted about what her friends and relatives and coworkers were up to. But Grandpa and I always read Time Magazine. For two years we’d been reading about a new disease called AIDS, which stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Just that spring, scientists had figured out that AIDS is caused by a virus—the kind of bug that gives you the flu—which gets into your blood. Once it’s been there long enough, it knocks out your immune system, which is made up of particular types of cells in your blood that usually help you fight off illnesses and keep you well. Right now there is no vaccine or any other kind of medicine that rids your body of the AIDS virus and repairs your immune system. So once you have AIDS, you start coming down with all kinds of other diseases, and eventually you die from them.
    When Grandpa and I first started reading about AIDS, doctors weren’t absolutely sure about all the ways the new virus they had discovered was spread around. They did know that you could get it by having sex with someone who had it, or by using a hypodermic needle that was contaminated with the virus. During sex your body absorbs your partner’s semen or vaginal discharge, which could carry the virus. A needle with contaminated blood on it is like a four-lane highway to AIDS, because you could inject the virus right into your own bloodstream. A third way the virus can get into your blood is from a transfusion of blood or blood products like Factor VIII that happened to come from someone with AIDS.
    Because you can get AIDS from doing certain things, some groups of people were in more danger of catching it. One group was gay men, who passed the virus along through sex. For a while, scientists thought only gay men got AIDS, and many people still think of it as “the gay disease,” even though drug addicts get it too. Some addicts who use needles, share them, and they can spread AIDS to others that way. Whenever I had an injection at home or in the hospital, we used a new needle. After all the times I’ve been stuck and all the medicine I’ve had to take, I can’t imagine anyone actually wanting to use needles or drugs. But people do. They should find out what it’s like to have to take drugs all the time!
    The last group who could get AIDS were hemophiliacs and other people who needed blood transfusions and injections of blood products. AIDS was kind of lurking around in the background for all families of hemophiliacs, but back then nobody I knew except Grandpa seemed to take it very seriously. Grandpa and I had read everything we could find about it. We heard about older hemophiliacs with severe cases like mine, who had gotten AIDS from the Factor that they needed as much as I did. That upset Grandpa. He started telling Mom not to give me Factor anymore. “I just have a bad feeling it’s not going to work out like we hoped,” he said.
    “Dad!” You could tell Mom was irritated. “It’s Factor that’s kept Ryan alive all these years. You know I can’t stop his shots now. It wouldn’t be fair. Without Factor he’d be in the hospital all the time.”
    “Jeanne, I’m just scared to death Ryan’s going to catch AIDS,” Grandpa said.
    “But Grandpa,” I cut in, “we saw in Time that less than one percent of hemophiliacs have AIDS, and they’re older guys—not kids. Maybe they’re gay too, and got AIDS that way.”
    Less than one percent—none of them children. That was practically nobody.
    Even so, I hadn’t felt very well all