“I wrote down the names of 106 friends on my ‘goodbye’ list—and then I just stopped counting, but that did not stop the dying,” James Vellequette, who has been living with HIV for twenty-six years, admitted during the interview about his life in the time of the HIV and AIDS epidemic. “I live with a quiet ticking noise in the back of my head thinking that I am always running out of time” (qtd. in Anderson-Minshall). As it is defined in Aiken’s book Dying, Death, and Bereavement, Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV, is a virus which attacks the infected person’s immune system, making it incredibly difficult or even impossible to fight off even the most basic diseases. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, otherwise known as AIDS, may result
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It revealed that five young, gay men, who had no other underlying illnesses, were treated for Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in California. Randy Shilts claims that Pneumocystis carinii is “one of tens of thousands of creatures that are easily held in check by people’s normally functioning immune systems” (34); however, when a person’s immune system is not working properly, such as when they have either been on chemotherapy or had it suppressed to accept a transplanted organ, it may begin to grow and thrive in that person’s lungs. According to the CDC’s report, these men had no such medical complications that could have caused the pneumonia. With these first five cases, an epidemic was born. More and more people began to fall sick with the mysterious and fatal disease, showing symptoms ranging from “fungus on the fingers, the diarrhea and the herpes, . . . shortness of breath” and more (Shilts 55). With the rise in number of strikingly similar cases, the “AIDS Timeline” notes that the term AIDS was coined in 1982 to describe the condition and has been used from then on. The amount of cases continued to increase rapidly until 1995, which had the “peak incidence” of new AIDS cases (Osmond). In 2013, the CDC reported that more than 650,000 people had died from complications that may have arisen from AIDS since the 1980s, and just over 340,000 of those people were men who have sex with men (“HIV
It revealed that five young, gay men, who had no other underlying illnesses, were treated for Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in California. Randy Shilts claims that Pneumocystis carinii is “one of tens of thousands of creatures that are easily held in check by people’s normally functioning immune systems” (34); however, when a person’s immune system is not working properly, such as when they have either been on chemotherapy or had it suppressed to accept a transplanted organ, it may begin to grow and thrive in that person’s lungs. According to the CDC’s report, these men had no such medical complications that could have caused the pneumonia. With these first five cases, an epidemic was born. More and more people began to fall sick with the mysterious and fatal disease, showing symptoms ranging from “fungus on the fingers, the diarrhea and the herpes, . . . shortness of breath” and more (Shilts 55). With the rise in number of strikingly similar cases, the “AIDS Timeline” notes that the term AIDS was coined in 1982 to describe the condition and has been used from then on. The amount of cases continued to increase rapidly until 1995, which had the “peak incidence” of new AIDS cases (Osmond). In 2013, the CDC reported that more than 650,000 people had died from complications that may have arisen from AIDS since the 1980s, and just over 340,000 of those people were men who have sex with men (“HIV