A Friend in Deed - woman takes in friend with AIDS

No one understood why Lynda Johnson took in a woman whom doctors had written off. But her sacrifice saved her friend's life

IN A HOSPITAL ROOM IN SOUTH CAROLINA, 32-year-old Juanita Williams awaits what she thinks will be a routine operation--having her tubes tied. It's a Friday morning in 1989.

"What is taking these people so long?" Juanita mutters to herself. Her appointment was at 8:00 A.M., and two hours later, she's still sprawled atop a bed in the surgery prep room.

At ten past ten, Juanita storms oft the bed, hand-pinning from behind the hospital gown that threatens to expose her backside. She spots a nurse.

"Excuse me, but I've been waiting ..."

"The doctor will be with you soon."

Juanita stomps back to her door, climbs onto the table--and waits. Finally, at noon, the physician, an elderly White man, steps into Juanita's doorway and startles her with a shout across the room: "Ms. Williams, get your clothes and go home," he says. "I cannot do this surgery. Your blood test shows that you have AIDS."

Before Juanita can reply, the doctor disappears into the hall. Seconds later Juanita jumps from her bed and darts after him. "What do you mean ..."

Juanita's question turns to sobs. She doesn't know much about AIDS, but what little she has heard is devastating: pain. Abandonment by friends and family. And death--an early death.

That afternoon Juanita went home to her apartment, unplugged her phone, turned oft her lights--and wailed in hysteria. "All I wanted to do was die," she says.

Now, a decade after she first learned she was HIV-positive, Juanita can hardly believe that she once allowed an ignorant, unfeeling doctor to send her reeling. "I didn't even know I was being tested for AIDS," she says. "And there was no pretest or posttest counseling." Juanita, 42, also shudders at the memory of wanting to take her life--one now filled with giving hope to others living with AIDS.

Juanita is quick to credit Mends and family with her "I can beat AIDS" spirit. But she'll also tell you that one woman has sacrificed immeasurably: her lifelong friend, Lynda Johnson. In the family room of Lynda's townhouse in Harlem one Sunday morning, over bagels and juice and sometimes with tears, the two relive Juanita's news, the strength of their 37-year relationship--and the selflessness that led Lynda to sacrifice for her friend.

Like Lynda, Like Juanita

You only have to be in a room with Lynda and Juanita for minutes before you know they're more than friends. "Remember when Boo Boo and Carol used to dress up like twins?" Lynda says. Without answering, Juanita cuts in with "Girl, I'll never forget those waistline parties in your parents' basement--we charged people a nickel for every inch of their waist!"

The two throw their heads back in laughter, moments later recalling how they became friends as 5-year-olds in south Syracuse, New York. As the children of the first two Black families in their neighborhood, they vowed to play together every day. From then on, the two shared everything from first crushes to birthdays.

So it only made sense that on the Saturday after Juanita learned she was HIV-positive, she called Lynda.

"Lynda," Juanita choked out between sobs, "the doctor ... said ... I'm gonna die ... I got AIDS, and I'm ..."

"Nita, Nita--what are you saying?" Lynda said.

"The doctor ..." Nita's words gave way to moans.

"Okay, Nita, I'm gonna hang up for two minutes, and I want you to calm down. Call me back when you can tell me what's wrong, okay?"

Click. Less than a minute passed before Lynda's phone rang.

"I've got AIDS," Juanita finally spit out. "I went for an operation, and the doctor says I have AIDS."

Lynda reassured her friend that a person must first be HIV-positive before she can have AIDS, and then she gave Juanita an AIDS-information number. "Nothing's ever as bad as you think," Lynda told Juanita. "You're gonna beat this thing."

Lynda's words were enough to give Juanita hope that day. But in the following weeks Juanita fell into depression, functioning just enough to continue working as an assistant manager at a restaurant. "For six months I shut out the world," she says. "I gained 40, 50, maybe 60 pounds."

Not until Juanita moved to Atlanta seeking adequate health care in late 1990 did her darkness begin to lift. Armed with information she had gathered about AIDS and courage borrowed from her best friend, Juanita decided she would win her battle against AIDS.

First Juanita traced the onset of her disease to 1984, when, after moving in with a boyfriend, she learned he was using heroin. Juanita left the relationship when she discovered her boyfriend's addiction, but she later found out that he had died of AIDS the following year.

Next she talked with people living with HIV, learning that many didn't see their illness as a death sentence. Wanting to learn all she could about her illness and to serve others, Juanita volunteered for Sister Love, Inc., an organization that supports Black women with AIDS. Finally, in 1992, Juanita summoned the courage to tell her family she was HIV-positive.

"They were surprised and hurt," she remembers. "But their support never wavered. I think that their acceptance was a big part of my healing."

To many who knew Juanita, her transformation from a sister overcome by her illness to one who reached out to people living with AIDS seemed to make her disease less real, its complications less imminent. But even for the most brave, the illness never goes away--it just sleeps. In 1998, with stress from a new boyfriend's death from AIDS and a taxing travel schedule, Juanita's illness suddenly awakened.

Room for a Sick Friend?

One Saturday last June, Lynda's cell phone rang with the news she had been dreading: Juanita's HIV had finally given way to AIDS. In tears and exasperation, Juanita explained from her Atlanta hospital bed that a mysterious lump had grown on her neck, and an unyielding fever had consumed her body and outwitted doctors' efforts for five weeks.

Doctors told Juanita's family--who had rushed from Syracuse to her bedside--that Juanita was in the final stages of her illness. Doctors urged the family to move Juanita back to Syracuse, but Juanita feared that her family--because of the doctors' grim prognosis--would treat her as if she were already dead. So in a voice just above a whisper, Juanita asked her best friend the most difficult question of her life: Could Lynda find room in her New York City home for a friend dying of AIDS?

"I could hear in Nita's voice that she had given up," says Lynda, who is style director for Children's Business magazine, an international children's apparel publication based in Manhattan. "Juanita is my family. It didn't matter to me whether she wanted to stay with me for a day, a month or a year--the answer, without question, was yes."

The two women glance at each other in the knowing way that girlfriends often do, then Juanita picks up their story. "I didn't want to call Lynda," she admits. "My pride kept telling me, `Don't do it, don't do it,' because I didn't want to get in the way of Lynda's life. But I didn't know what else to do."

Certainly, Lynda had ample reason to turn Juanita away--a demanding job, night college courses, a new boyfriend and a set of personal tragedies so harrowing that she's still struggling to make peace. In 1995 Lynda's mother was shot to death when teenage burglars broke into her Syracuse home. A few months later Lynda's husband, Earl, was suddenly hospitalized with an undetermined illness, and within three weeks her source of strength was gone.

Indeed, death had come to Lynda's door so frequently that friends feared she'd only be hurt again by taking Juanita in. "Everybody was warning me, but I couldn't listen," Lynda says, adding that one of her few supporters was her neighbor Dr. Brenda Harris, a physician specializing in AIDS eases who had agreed to help care for Juanita. Lynda continues: "Nita had enough people around her treating her like she was already gone. I was focused on making her happy and getting her better."

Days after Lynda consented to take Juanita in, she sat at the bedside of her frail best friend, who could barely stand or speak without rambling. Juanita had dropped nearly 40 pounds in the five previous weeks.

"When I saw how weak Nita was, how thin her hair had become, I was really scared," Lynda says. "Nita looked worse than I'd ever seen her. Her eyes--they just looked vacant."

Adding to Lynda's fear was the fact that she couldn't cancel an overseas business trip coinciding with Juanita's first days at her home. But Lynda left her friend in the care of Juanita's sister, who had flown in from Syracuse to help. A day after Lynda left for Europe, her friend was admitted to Harlem Hospital. Harris, now Juanita's primary physician, suspected that Juanita's fever was linked to an infection called microbacterium avium complex (MAC), which eats at the body's major organs and bone marrow.

Harris discovered that her patient was indeed suffering from MAC--and not from the illness the physicians in Atlanta had treated her for. Once Harris gave Juanita the correct medication, Juanita was out of the hospital in a week. That day Juanita and Lynda made a sister-to-sister pact like the one of their childhood. The promise was that Juanita would be treated as a visiting houseguest--not as a dying friend.

The Will to Live

Every morning for the six months following their pact, Lynda would rush up to the fourth-floor guest bedroom that became Juanita's home, checking to see that Juanita had remembered to take her medicine--a total of 26 different pills, taken five times throughout the day. She encouraged Juanita to stick to her strict vegetarian diet and exercise plans, and she surrounded her with fruit and bottles of water--"a must," Harris had insisted. From work, Lynda sometimes called four times a day to check on Juanita. Occasionally she missed work to take her friend to doctor appointments.

"She didn't want me to take care of her, but I was on her case, showing her what she needed to do to get her independence again," Lynda says.

"Lynda's will for me to live became my will," Juanita says. "She just wouldn't let me give up."

Thanks to the new combination drug therapies--including protease inhibitors--that are extending the lives of people living with AIDS, Juanita started the slow climb back to health about three months after moving in with Lynda. After Juanita had regained the 40 pounds she'd lost, the best friends parted last November. But they are just minutes apart: Juanita moved into her own apartment in The Bronx section of New York.

Juanita still follows a 26-pills-a-day regimen. And lately she has had to endure a side effect of her stronger medication--loss of feeling in her feet. Then there are frustrations about how long she can survive New York City's high cost of living on a small monthly disability allowance.

But at least all talk of death has ceased, replaced by routine girlfriend stuff: their plans to go to a day spa, Harris's push for Juanita to exercise, life's ordinary ups and downs. Even with Juanita`s trips around the world as an AIDS motivational speaker and Lynda's hectic work schedule, the friends manage to call each other weekly.

"I'm living again because of Lynda," Juanita says. The compliment is too much for Lynda. She glances at Juanita, then tries to shrug oft the praise. "I was just being a friend," she says. "Juanita would have done the same for me."

RELATED ARTICLE: Think Positively

Black women have quietly become the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population to contract the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). In the United States, sixty percent of those who reported having AIDS in 1997 (the last year for which statistics are available) were African-Americans. Such grim figures have led researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta to label the epidemic the leading cause of death among Black women between the ages of 25 and 44.

"African-Americans must realize that this epidemic is not going away," says Helene D. Gayle, M.D., director of the CDC's National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention. "And it is taking a great toll on Black women."

The stats are no less alarming for 25-to-44-year-old Black men, for whom AIDS is also the No. 1 killer. In fact, experts say Black women are primarily being infected through unprotected sex with brothers who have secrets--histories of intravenous drug use or bisexuality, for example.

Experts say the best way for Black women to take aim at the stats is to become informed. But most of all, they urge women to get tested, to ask their partners about their sexual histories and to insist that they also be tested, to avoid unprotected sex, or practice abstinence.

One of the most overlooked recovery therapies for sisters living with AIDS is a life-affirming friendship, say some psychologists. "Many forget that we area `we' people, that we have a heritage and a culture that promotes connectedness," says Dr. Gail E. Wyatt, professor of psychiatry at UCLA and author of Stolen Women: Reclaiming Our Sexuality, Taking Back Out Lives. "When you encounter a devastating illness and then share it, it feeds the immune system and your emotional well-being. Even if your supporters don't do anything for you, just knowing that you are supported can have a positive effect."--N.M.C.

Nichole M. Christian is bureau chief at Time magazine in Detroit. Michelle Burford is articles editor at ESSENCE.

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