When Jackie went to her first People With AIDS Coalition meeting, she was the only female and heterosexual there.
"I looked around me and all I saw were gay men," said Jackie, who asked that her real name not be used. "But I knew we all shared a common bond. We all have AIDS."She is a Salt Lake City nurse who, with the cooperation of her employer, continues to work when she is not sick. Yet she knows she is dying.
"But today I am living," she told about 125 people attending an AIDS awareness seminar at St. Benedict's Hospital on Monday.
Jackie is a former intravenous drug user but said that is not how she contracted the disease.
"I never used a dirty needle," she said. "But in 1981 when I was in a drug treatment center, I met a man and when we got out of the center we started living together . . . and today we have two sons."
She said that when the AIDS scare started, "I was so glad he was not gay or bisexual."
But he had shared needles when he abused drugs, and when she became ill and "too scared to be tested for AIDS," he went to be tested and was found to B have the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, she said.
Afraid of what people would think in Utah, Jackie said she went to San Francisco to be tested.
"They said I had AIDS . . .. For the next six months, I was so sick I wanted to die, waited to die. But then I thought about my two sons (who do not have AIDS) and my job and decided to fight it," she said.
Unlike Jackie, David Sharpton, executive director of the Utah chapter of People With AIDS Coalition, has no qualms about using his name but knows there are many fellow sufferers in Utah who fear public humiliation.
Sharpton said they are discriminated against in their jobs and sometimes even shunned by their families.
Sharpton formed the Utah chapter of People With AIDS with six people in his living room 18 months ago. The organization now has 176 members.
Sally Scofield, a McKay-Dee Hospital social worker, said that when she worked with her first AIDS patient three years ago, she was a bit fearful.
"But as I worked with the young man, who had been excommunicated from his church and lacked family support, the fear vanished, as it did for his other caretakers," she said.
Scofield said she was unable to find a nursing home from Brigham City to Salt Lake City that was willing to take the man as a patient.
She said the man wouldn't let Hospice help him, but still he was afraid of dying alone.
"I know I shouldn't have made the promise, but I did. I told him I wouldn't let him die alone . . . and by the will of God and a nudge, I was there when he died," she said.
"He had been comatose, but when I asked him if he knew who I was, he said, `Yes.' He then took my hand and gave it a squeeze and a few minutes later he was dead."