AIDS The Ultimate Challenge [Paperback]

AIDS
None of us is so unique as to be exempt from the human condition.
As the numbers of reported AIDS cases continue to climb, and the disease continues to take more and more lives, those who have to deal with the complexities of this problem continue to ask: How do we care for these terminally ill?
Using letters from patients, questions and answers between patient and doctor, and other compassionate tools, Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the world's foremost expert on death and dying, shows us how to comfort the seriously ill and help AIDS patients through the critical stages of dying She addresses the stigma surrounding AIDS as a gay disease and makes a special plea for prisoners with AIDS, for women and children with AIDS, and for babies with AIDS. This remarkable book is warm and informative on one of the most important subjects of our time.Chapter 1

Working with AIDS Patients

My work with AIDS patients started right at the beginning of the epidemic, totally unplanned and spontaneous, as all my work had proceeded in the previous two decades, if it were not already my whole life-style! In the early eighties, we knew very little about this peculiar disease. All we heard (and mainly from the West Coast gay community) was that new cases were diagnosed daily and that many of those young men were dying rather rapidly. There were no cases of homosexual women reported to have contracted the disease. No one knew much about the mode of transmission. The general public just started to become afraid of the upcoming news on radio and TV, but did not feel threatened because it happened to others, people with whom they felt they had very little in common anyway, as a former neighbor expressed it.

It all began early in 1981 when I received a phone call from a stranger who asked rather shyly if I would consider taking an AIDS patient to one of my five-day workshops. He seemed to doubt that he'd get an affirmative anl£&