AIDS Survivors

Merrie Windley, a mother with AIDS

"It was in 1994 when I learned I had HIV. On that same day I lost my job and my home. All my friends left me."

"Before that devastating day, I had never even known anyone who had had HIV. I had never thought that it could happen to me. My fourteen-year-old son and I went to live in a welfare hotel."

"Sometimes I blame myself for my infection.  And so do others.  But there is more to it than that.  I was in a committed, loving relationship.  I would have been safe in that relationship, if he had not been infected, either directly or indirectly, through a dirty needle."

"In AIDS policy, the message should be that human life is valuable and that others should be spared what my son and I are suffering."⁽¹⁾

Michele Giordano, a college student, whose father injected heroin and died of AIDS

An advocate for needle exchange, Michele Giordano says. "I remember my father hardly able to stand and with lesions all over his body.  It's hard to see a parent die a little every day.  But the message I have heard is clear: My father's life was not valuable enough to save."

"Needle exchange could have given me a relationship I have never had.  I don't want another child crying over their parent's grave."⁽²⁾

Footnotes

(1) Merrie Windley. 1997. "Why a mother with AIDS will march." Trenton Times (Trenton, NJ), October 20, p. A13.

(2) Wendy Ginsberg. 1998. "Study: Needle exchange may benefit minorities." Daily Targum (Rutgers University student newspaper), November 10, p. 7.

For a list of other materials used on this website, see References.