How's Everyone Feeling Right Meow?

[Pat Mustard]

My friend had a scare last year, he was convinced he was showing symptoms but thankfully came back negative

Actually I'm due a trip down the clap clinic myself, been too long. I don't suspect I have anything, but best get checked.

I was like that before finding 12 Steppers.

Turns out the pills and drink were screwing me up all on their own, and my imagination did the rest.


There was just an article in the paper recently about some of the earliest hiv cases, and what's known now about that time.  Some preserved tissue samples from the 70s turned up.  HIV was present and spreading long before "Pateint Zero". Not mentioned in the article though was how the case tracking thru Patient Zero helped establish how it was happening.

I'm aware of a sudden and unexpected death in the Midwest of something eerily similar to PCP in '78.  Too late now to ever find out if it was or wasn't hiv, but it's something that has rattled my cage for decades.  A friend of mine in the 80s who died 'rattled some cages' at the hospital he was at.  They had hiv cases before him, but he was different, he had never traveled out of Iowa.  All the other cases they had seen up to that time had all been diagnosed in NYC or Frisco and then they traveled back to be with family.  My friend was the first at that hospital to have contracted it in the state.

I haven't lost anyone I know to it in years.  2007 if I had to hazard a guess, and that was from medication side effects and underlying heart disease.  For my group, the worst of it was over in 95, and just a few 'stragglers' since.  And it wasn't so much treatment had improved by then, it was more that all the hiv+ people I knew had died by then.  Not counting hiv+ people I have subsequently met at 12 Steppers, damn few of my friends from the 70s onward who were positive survived.

The artwork at the office had the faces of upwards of 40 people in it, close enough,  . . . close enough

too close.

I've read that the whole Patient Zero thing was a misread of his actual designation of Patient O (O for from outside California, where they were tracking from). And that at no point within the scientific community was the man considered the locus within the US. It's just the media got word of Patient Zero and ran with it.

I've also read that there were cases in the UK which are considered to be AIDS from at least the sixties. It's a lot older than we probably know.