The Daily Populous Monday October 7th, 2024 morning edition
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Peelboy on October 6th, 2024 at 16:26 UTC »

Those were bad days, my parents had a friend get in an accident and required a blood transfusion. He picked it up and unknowingly passed it to his wife, they both died. I was a little kid and remember it being so awful.

timmeh519 on October 6th, 2024 at 18:31 UTC »

This is a powerful picture. I lost my uncle from complications due to AIDS in 2004. He was depressed and wouldn’t keep up with his medication. I only wish he would have held on a little longer with all the progress made in treating HIV.

Next year I’ll be the same age he was when he died. RIP uncle David and everyone else who’ve succumbed to this awful disease.

samaramatisse on October 6th, 2024 at 19:14 UTC »

Edit: I did not expect this comment to make such an impression on people. Thank you for your incredibly kind and supportive words.

My uncle died of AIDS in 1992, just before the first AIDS medication "cocktails" were becoming more widely available. He had been a very big, burly guy, was skin and bones by the end.

My elderly grandparents couldn't care for him at home when the symptoms became more advanced. He was destitute after being unable to work, so he was put into a men's hospice where he waited to die.

I turned 10 about six weeks before he died. I remember going with my mom to visit him in the hospice. Walking through the hospice to get to my uncle's room was horrifying. The gaunt, haggard men scared me. They were waiting to die too. They were poor or had been abandoned by their families in their time of need.

This was Central Indiana not even two years after Ryan White's death, so you can imagine the staggering amount of compassion these men received. /s

The last time I saw him alive was in that hospice. He couldn't speak; the disease was finally affecting his brain.

We brought him flowers. He'd always been exceedingly talented with floral design, interior design, that kind of thing. The flowers were in a little hand bouquet and he motioned for my mom to put them in his water jug.

So she did, but then he motioned her to bring it closer to him. I thought he wanted to smell them.

He very slowly arranged them to his liking with a little smirk, then laid back and fell asleep. He died not long after. My mom's side of the family fractured without him and was never the same.