Where have all the Guardian Angels Gone?

I was also incredulous. How could a life prescribed be so suddenly and irrevocably altered? I think that must have been the first time I wondered where the guardian angels were. It was also the beginning of my disaffection with blind faith, my mistrust of authority and my need to be in control.

A lot was forged in those early days.

Thirteen years after the public introduction of AIDS at a government press conference, I am again terrified and confused, angry and incredulous. I guess some things stay with us.

For the Last three weeks I have been working, day and night on my installation. As I write this I am nursing a cold. I probably caught it from someone on the subway at rush hour. I am sure it's just a cold but think that maybe this is it. Maybe this is the onset of more serious opportunistic infections.

Over the years I have learned to allow for the possibility that I might get sick, but not wallow in it. I've learned to lessen the stress such thoughts can cause me because the stress itself could be worse to my immune system than the cold. And, I have learned to remember that it is normal to get colds at this time of the year. Yet, I would be lying if I did not admit that, no matte how brief these thoughts may be, they are always threatening to take over and they are terrifying.

Regardless of how many times I tell myself that it's just this or that, I still stare at any new mark on my body for days, finding true relief only when it either disappears or is positively identified as a common bruise. I briefly worry if I am felling a bit tired, even though I may have exerted myself sufficiently to feel that way. I religiously watch a cut, any cut no matter how small, until it first scabs over and then disappears.

Angel de mi guardia
humilde te pido
no me desampares
en todo peligro

These days I am confused by all the conflicting information about the nature of HIV, the cause of AIDS and all the benefits and dangers of the various therapies and anti-viral drugs. The official medical establishment is adamant about HIV being the cause of AIDS, perhaps a bit too adamant, yet a growing number of equally respectable scientists and doctors is not so sure. Could they be so wrong? I am confused when a doctor gives me a clean bill of health and simultaneously suggests putting me into an AZT trial, even though I know and he admits that AZT is poison - and not much of a therapy. I am confused when one doctor tells me that a t cell count of 500 or above is normal while another feels that 370 is also o.k.

Angel de la guardia, dulce compañía
no me desampares
ni de noche, ni de día
Con Dios me acuesto, con Dios me lavanto
con la Virgen María y el Espiritu Santo.
Cuatro pilares tiene mi cama
y cuatro angelitos que me la guardan.

I am confused alright. But I am also mad as hell. I am furious that Gallo and Montagnier, co-discoverers of the HIV virus, now admit that most HIV positive individuals will not et sick. Hell, Montagnier has even questioned his own HIV hypothesis! Just a few years ago they did not hesitate to pass on a death sentence on everyone testing positive. Only a matter o f time before you got sick and died, they said. Except that the time is getting longer and more us are not dying. I am angry because while there is definitely a major crisis of the immune system raging on the medical establishment is again in an internal war of works, innuendo and personal slurs, a babble of egos, when they should be engaged in dialogue and cooperation. And while the old boys are defending their turfs and their grants, people are dying. I am angry because, like so many years ago, persons of putative authority are trying to make life-altering decisions for me.

Angel de mi guardia
humilde te pido
no me desampares
en todo peligro.

The stakes are higher now, but I am not thirteen anymore. I don't know what AIDS is, or even if there is AIDS. I don't know if HIV causes AIDS or if it is just one of many inoffensive retroviruses. I do know that whatever it is that causing people's immune systems to fail is a health issue, and should be dealt with as such. Morality, anyone's morality, and politics, right, middle of left, have no role to play in this dialogue and should butt out.

I don't know where all the guardian angels have gone. For most of my life I don't feel I've been without. It seems I have always been protected. Not by ethereal institutional types with wings, but by friends and family and a little common sense.

2,000 is still only five years away.

I'll be fifty three then.

Some things never change.

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