Thank you so much for telling that story. It’s quite similar to a dramatization in part of the recent UK mini-series “It’s A Sin" that triggered so many painful memories for me that I wasn’t able to finish watching it.

I lived in lower Manhattan during the very worst of the HIV years, as death rates were peaking and no effective treatment looked likely. I lost more friends than I like to remember.

I’m so glad that medical attitudes had changed by the mid-90s. St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village became a center of expertise for treating HIV, even when treatment didn’t offer a lot of hope. Sometimes wards were so crowded that patients were cared for in hospital beds in corridors.

But through the very worst of it, the nurses, doctors and other staff at St. Vincent’s provided an unparalleled level of compassionate care. They worked to educate families and patients, to provide the best level of comfort and treatment possible, and to honor patient wishes toward the end of life even when they had to skirt certain professional ethics codes to do it.

Some St. Vincent’s medical professionals emerged from those years psychologically scarred as the epidemic wound down with a whimper rather than any kind of bang to celebrate. I think many of them didn’t find closure, even though they were heroes whose praises deserve to be sung.