They were there to care

Last evening I watched the documentary 5B. It is about the first hospital ward specifically for AIDS patients. It was at San Francisco General Hospital and opened in the early 1980s. The story is told through archival video and interviews with nurses, doctors, volunteers, a few of the later patients who survived, and a few family members of those who died. When the first AIDS patients started showing up at hospitals the doctors and nurses didn’t want to deal with them. They didn’t know how the disease spread and were afraid they would catch it. They saw how deadly it was. They would wrap themselves in gowns, gloves, masks, and all the rest to the point of looking like they were wearing spacesuits. The lead nurse saw what those layers were doing to the patients. She proposed a ward for just AIDS patients staffed with nurses who volunteered for the job. They did something heroic – they took off the masks, gowns, and gloves so they could touch the patients skin to skin. The patients were desperate for this type of contact. The staff knew they were not there to cure. They were there to care. Since they knew many patients were estranged from family they allowed the patients to define family. Pets were allowed. Partners were allowed to get into bed with patients. Entertainer Rita Rockett was part of a dinner party every Sunday. Good food was brought in and the patients were served. When asked to have a diet soft drink Rita said, “There’s nothing diet here.” Ice cream was readily available. This sounds like a highly compassionate way to offer care. Alas, with so many patients dying (as in all of them over time) it took its toll on the caregivers. With this type of care forget clinical detachment. There was some exploration of the homophobia in the wider world. A second part of the story was the homophobia in the rest of the hospital staff. Some nurses expressed fear of getting ill from a patient’s blood and demanded they needed to know a patient’s HIV status. They wanted to ban the skin to skin care. The nurses of the ward responded by inviting others to film them offering this contact care, providing much of the video we saw. This was a conflict through the film. Spoiler alert: The nurse’s union told the ward to keep up the compassionate care. As for the rest of the hospital, you are always going to be working with bodily fluids. If you want to be safe, switch to accounting. After drugs to treat AIDS became available the 5B ward was disbanded and AIDS patients became a part of general hospital care. This led to my big question. At the start of the film one of the nurses is shown entering a dark and deserted hospital floor. Since this is a nurse we see in interview this empty floor was filmed recently. Why was this floor of the hospital going unused 20 years after the AIDS ward was disbanded? Wouldn’t it have been full of other kinds of patients? Was this unintended commentary about the state of hospitals in 2019? Or was it set up like this for filming and if so would a hospital move all the patients off a floor for a day? One of the nurses summed up what they did: It is important for humans to be there for each other. We made a difference in the way they died.