As a physician who has worked with patients living with HIV since the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, I’ve seen the darkness and the light.
Back then, it was a scary, anxious time—not only for patients, but also for clinicians. We lacked effective medical treatments.
Patients swallowed handfuls of pills. These complex regimens often worked only for short periods of time and brought difficult side effects.
Contracting HIV seemed like a painful death sentence—and one that too often lacked dignity, as many morticians then refused to embalm those who had succumbed to the disease.