Can't imagine what it must have been like back then. The lack of gov response in some places was appalling:
I’m reminded of a story Dr. Gabriel Torres told me about his first visit to intensive care at St. Vincent’s, where he would later become director of AIDS care. He was a medical student on rotation in 1983 or 1984. The disease was still so under-reported that he had not yet heard of it. In the ICU, he found young gay men, intubated for pneumonia, taking up eight of the nine beds. His eyes went cold as he recalled the scene of waling mothers and panicked lovers. “During these days, I mean, the things that went on ...”
During those same days, I was a young reporter at the above-referenced gay newspaper. We regularly received phone calls from St. Vincent patients complaining that staff members fearing the disease was airborne refused to bring them food, instead piling their trays outside their doors, or that terrified nurses wouldn’t bandage their wounds or change their soiled linens. It was like something out of a Saramago novel. I personally brought this information to Koch myself, as the first journalist with gay-media credentials to address him in a Blue Room press conference. He responded explosively. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he told me.
Those were the early days. As the epidemic mushroomed, the city’s hospitals simply ran out of space for all of the patients, and again he was silent. Deathly ill people were routinely turned away. At some hospitals, patients were lined up on gurneys along the emergency room hallways for days on end awaiting medical care that never came. When things went south, we all knew there was only one funeral home in the city — the gentle people at Redden’s on 14th Street — where we could bring our friends’ remains.
I do not recall Koch ever acknowledging these medieval conditions. He surely never took action, nor did he spare an ounce of sympathy for us in the trenches, not in public at least. more
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