Shannon Connolly and I first met on a spring afternoon in 1989 in the locked psychiatric ward of a hospital in the Bronx. She was there because of a suicide attempt; I was there because earlier that morning she had asked the ward psychiatrist if she could talk to an AIDS specialist about her condition.
When I knocked at the door of her room she was curled up in bed, motionless, her face to the wall. But as I walked in, she sat up and extended her hand. Thank you so much for coming, she said. She was 32 years old and little more than a bag of bones, her thinness accentuated by her marked pallor and long, lank hair. One of her eyes was slightly blackened and most of her teeth were missing. Track marks from years of heroin use wavered up both her arms. But her gaze was steady and her grip was firm; as she smiled and motioned me to a seat, I tried to remember when a patient had last treated me so courteously.
I wanted to see you because, well, I told everyone at the patients’ meeting last night that I have AIDS, Shannon said. The doctors knew, but the other patients thought I just came in here because I was really depressed. They got so angry at me--you know how people are about AIDS. I didn’t feel safe. No one’s talking to me. I’m just so scared. I’m scared about everything. What’s going to happen to me?
Between sobs and nose blowing, Shannon’s story came out. She’d been abused by her father, had left home at the age of 17, and had been a drug user and off-and-on prostitute ever since. It was a familiar story among inner-city AIDS patients, made even more tragic by Shannon’s obvious intelligence. She had wanted to be a veterinarian as a child, she said, had graduated from a suburban New Jersey high school, and had even taken some college-level biology courses. But when she tested positive in 1987 for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, she had plunged into a drug binge interrupted only by occasional hospitalizations.
