Caring For AIDS Patients, 'When No One Else Would'
Ruth Coker Burks was a young mother in her 20s when the AIDS epidemic hit her home state of Arkansas in the early 1980s. She took it upon herself to care for AIDS patients who were abandoned by their families, and even by medical professionals, who feared the disease.
Coker Burks, now 55, has no medical training, but she estimates that she has cared for nearly 1,000 people over the past three decades, including her friend Paul Wineland's partner.
She became involved after visiting a friend at a Little Rock hospital where one of the state's early AIDS patients was dying. "The nurses were drawing straws to see who would go in and check on him," Coker Burks tells Wineland at StoryCorps in Hot Springs, Ark.
"And so I snuck into his room. And he wanted his mama. And so I marched myself out to the nurses' station and I said, 'Can we call his mother?' And they go, 'Honey, his mama's not coming. He's been here six weeks. Nobody's coming.'
more
http://www.npr.org/2014/12/05/368530521/caring-for-aids-patients-when-no-one-else-would
= new reply since forum marked as read
There are actually people in the world that have a heart.
p.s...please, read the short story...it brings back memories of so many that were left to be alone...it was so sad.
