My Mom’s Residency Story

My mom was working in a major hospital during her residency, don’t remember the exact year but probably late 70s. They had all their beds filled with patients, all of them Haitian men, dying of what my mom described as being “some really bizarre things.” Nobody had any idea what they might have, but they were trying desperately to find out.

All of those patients died, and it was later realized that they had AIDS. It hadn’t even been identified at the time, so there was no way they could have known.

It scares me to think that she, and everyone else in that hospital, were unknowingly so close to something so lethal. That if they hadn’t followed correct procedures, or somebody wasn’t as cautious as they could have been, or made an honest mistake, they could have been in the same position as those patients.