In the Throes of AIDS

J.J. Hospital, a government hospital in Mumbai, has the largest A.R.T (antiretroviral therapy) center in Mumbai, with about 7000 patients currently enrolled. So many people were crammed into the waiting room of the center: Hindus, Muslims, young wives, old men, children, and all of them were HIV positive. I had never felt the force of the epidemic as I did that day. Standing in that crowded waiting room, being jostled by a crush of people trying to get life-saving medicines, I understood the scope of HIV. It wasn’t striking indiscriminately, and no one was to blame, but at the same time, I couldn’t help but be angry at the husbands who infected their wives and children. I know that this anger is not justified and this is not a question of fairness—no one deserves to get HIV, regardless of how risky their behaviors are—but I just felt like these women and children didn’t even have a chance to protect themselves.

My co-worker took me to the HIV wards, and one case I saw there made me cry. A woman, Supriya, lay on a bed in the last stages of AIDS. She had perhaps days left in her life, couldn’t talk, move, or respond, and was probably going to become comatose within hours. The flesh had just melted off her bones, and all that was left on the bed was a mass of jutting bones and taut, jaundiced skin. She had been in the hospital for 10 days, and the doctors hadn’t even bothered to give her any medications because according to them, there was no hope for her, as her CD4 count was disastrously low and her viral load was too high. So they left her on a bed in a dead end hallway to die, and she lay dying minute by agonizing minute, belaboring every breath she took.

Her mother and aunt were with her, and her mother told me Supriya’s story. Supriya’s husband was a truck driver employed by the Bombay Municipal Government and nine months ago, he had fallen ill. He died three weeks ago from full-blown AIDS, which he had probably contracted from a sex worker.

Supriya loyally took care of him, even though her own health was not as good as it had been, and Supriya’s mother pleaded with her to come to Bombay to get tests done to determine why she wasn’t feeling well. However Supriya said she didn’t want to leave her sick husband because she was afraid of what the in-laws would say if she left him; she did not want them to think that she left her husband when he needed her in order to get treatment for herself. She didn’t know about his sexual history, nor did she know he had AIDS—although he and his family knew and never told her. So she remained in a village hours away from her family, caring for her dying husband while she was slowly falling prey to the same killer that had ravaged her husband’s body. It was finally when he died that she learned the truth, but by the time she came to Bombay to get tested and treated, the only thing the doctors told her mother to do was pray.

Her mother sat watch over her daughter’s body, fanning away flies and straightening the blanket over the wasted flesh. She told me she only had two children, and now one lay dying before her. Supriya was barely 40 years old, and she had three children, the youngest of whom was eight years old. Her mother wanted to take care of these soon to be orphans, but barely made Rs. 2000 per month working as a maid and was struggling to pay for necessities for herself and her son as it was. She could not contemplate how to pay for the education and needs of three young children in addition to her already significant expenditures.

As she contemplated the future, this brave woman broke down into tears, and I put my arms around her and was so overwhelmed with emotion that I started to cry, too. It was not very professional of me, but there was nothing I could for this woman or her daughter in a professional capacity; the only thing left for me to do was mourn with her in a human capacity.