The Human Part Of Us
Published on 6/29/2024
The year was 1986. Kate Lindsay had just returned to the workforce, where she was an operating room (OR) nurse after taking four years off with her son when she read in an article in the Austin American Statesman that anyone who received blood transfusions since 1981 could be carrying HIV. Testing was recommended.
For a minute she wondered if she should go to the free clinic near the University of Texas at Austin where she worked and stick her arm out. She’d been given four units of blood in October 1981 when her son Victor was born. If she tested positive, the results could change everything. She’d nursed him for two and a half years. What if the virus was dormant in her yet had infected him? What about the moments of intimacy with her husband Don? What about her job? She was the primary breadwinner at the moment.
Lindsay chose to go to the free clinic. She chose a pseudonym she’d be sure was no one else’s, Victoria Snell Holem, the feminine for Victor, her middle name and her mother’s married name. She felt sure no one else would have been tested under that combination, so she’d be sure the results were hers.
“They drew my blood and said, ‘It’ll be like two or four weeks.’ I don’t remember, you know, exactly. It wasn’t like they could tell me before I left, right?” said Lindsey. We forget that in the 1980s, lab work took weeks to return.
Lindsay didn’t, couldn’t, keep this to herself long. She’s built to be honest and straightforward. She told her supervisor, “We might have a problem. I want to be honest with you. I’m scared to death, but I have to deal with this and you need to deal with it too. Whatever you say I will do, but this is where we’re at right now. I don’t know the answers yet, but I have been tested and when I know the answer, I’ll let you know.”
“He was really nice, and said, ‘Thank you for telling me. Take precautions from now until then.’” For a medical professional in the 80s that meant double gloving and staying away from needles and blades. Until then, cuts or punctures had been normal hazards like oven burns for cooks, smashed thumbs for construction workers, and sewage on the face for plumbers- not existential crises. But her supervisor told her, “Don’t scrub in,” meaning don’t prepare for surgery.
Before antiretroviral therapies (ART) changed the AIDS epidemic, everyone counted some cost - women of reproductive age, aspiring fathers, caregivers, and anyone in a high-risk category. Viruses respect no rules and honor no identities. Today, about 85.6 million people have been infected with HIV and about 40.4 million have died, according to the World Health Organization.
Lindsay waited several weeks for the letter that would tell her the results. During the wait, she reckoned with the possibilities. “If I had tested positive? I felt absolutely certain I would be asked not to work in the operating room. I wasn't sure they would even want me working as a nurse. So I was really concerned because I was basically the breadwinner of our family. I knew that my immediate family would be supportive. But I was concerned because I wouldn't have a profession. I tend to be pretty ‘This is who I am and this is what's going on,’” said Lindsey, but she didn’t tell everyone right away.
She went on working taking all the extra precautions until she received her results. Negative. Meanwhile, more and more young men were coming through the OR in need of the ports which made it possible for physicians to administer medicines to infected people. Lindsay's hospital started treating multiple people daily. Some news features at the time reported young people in their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties dying weekly. Many were dying surrounded by friends and caring strangers because they’d been rejected by their families.
Soon after, Lindsay and her husband learned that a man going to their church, Mike, had a partner with AIDS.
“I was fortunate to be in the Disciples of Christ. My husband's a Disciple minister,” said Lindsey. Her husband was preaching at another Disciple church at the time. “Our minister was just a very caring person, and the congregation was much more that way.” Having grown up Southern Baptist, “bumped into” Presbyterians, having family who were Episcopalians, and being raised by a mother who had been very open-minded, Lindsay was delighted to find a community of thoughtful, caring people.
Not all congregations in Austin were that way. “It was a new congregation. We went to an older Disciple church, and there was enough difference of opinion that they decided a group wanted to form a new congregation.”
In this congregation, Mike was well-loved. Lindsay had instantly liked him. Even though his partner didn’t come to church, she found her new supervisor when Mike told her about his partner’s port surgery.
“I need to be in that operating room. I don't need to be assigned to be responsible for anything except to be with him.”
The hospital staff knew her well, so after a momentary pause, she heard an “okay.”
“I went out and met him in the pre-op area and said, ‘I'm gonna be with you the whole time until you're back with Mike.’ We rolled in and I climbed down underneath the table so I wouldn’t be in the way of the surgeon and OR team. Some staff was confused. I said, ‘He's my friend. Just cover me up. I won't get in the way.’ I snuggled underneath this table, They did the procedure and I never moved. I just held his hand.” Then they rolled him into the recovery room and told the other staff to take care of him. He died within a year.
Before his death, Don, Lindsay's husband, used his law knowledge to draw up Mike and his partner’s wills and final documents, which would help Mike be present with his partner in the hospital. Not until the Supreme Court decided in favor of marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 were the rights of a partner guaranteed. The church did the funeral.
“The human part of us was there. The faith part of our community was there. None of his family was there. Just Mike and us,” Lindsay said. By us, she means her congregation.
The fear around HIV/AIDS was intense. What emerged first among gay men - noticeably absent among lesbian women - as some form of cancer called Kaposi’s Sarcoma or as some kind of pneumonia - was an immune-suppressing virus that left humans vulnerable to illnesses that even most babies survived. While it quickly killed gay men, it became the “perfect virus that came along to prove you right,” to quote from the BBC series “It’s a Sin” - where “you” is the people who saw HIV as vengeance or consequence for those who’d committed immoral acts. But the virus didn’t discriminate when it came to nursing babies, faithful partners, heterosexuals, and people who needed a transfusion.
Some of Lindsay’s medical colleagues vented in the breakroom and feared handling blood or bodily fluids, shying away from patients dying or suffering alone. But they dealt with the cost of taking risky drugs to fend off exposure. The infected attempted all manner of irrational and unproven remedies from mega-doses of vitamins, drinking their own urine, and trying anything, however unproven, to save their own lives.
Perhaps it was the therapies and prevention methods that emerged, that eased the fears. Perhaps the emergence of other infectious diseases, like Hepatitis A, B, and C, taught the medical establishment that they needed to take each virus, each exposure with equal gravity. But the advocacy and love that people like Lindsay brought to the crisis has also reduced the stigma towards LGBTQ+ people. She remains an unabashed advocate and ally with Free Mom Hugs, her church and its ministries, and the League of Women Voters, among others.