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Post by RangoA@live.com on Jul 8, 2008 5:23:07 GMT -5
 I was picked up at the train station by my mother and one of my brother's pals. That guy who picked me up had a rent controlled apartment in the western side of Greenwich Village. I lived almost directly across the street from St. Vincent's Hospital when I moved into his apartment that night. He went to live with another close pal of my brother. My mother was already taking care of and living with my brother whom had full blown AIDS by the time I got there. What a horrible surprise that was?!?! I knew he was sick, however not that he had was going to die within a very short period of time. He said, the average was for someone with his t-cell/white blood cell count to live was two years or less. So, I'm living about six blocks away from him and doing all sorts of chores so he could continue to work. I mean I had to grocery shop, water the outdoor garden of his penthouse in the East Village (which took about two hours since it was so big), go to all these formal events with powerful people he knew in NY and spend the night with him in his hospital room for days sometimes weeks at a time trying to take care of him when the nurses were busy and he was afraid and alone at nighttime especially. I mean what a nightmare. I got a job within three months of living there at NY Life Insurance Company in Gramercy Park. I used to walk to work and back to his penthouse or the hospital during that time unless he was in a hospital that wasn't close enough and I would take public transportation then. Next, I applied and got accepted to a few universities in the City Universities of New York (CUNY.) I decided on BMCC again, since it was so tediously difficult to have all my previous transcripts from other colleges sent to other universities that I hadn't attended before and I had already gone to college there so I had a lot of credits that didn't need to be transferred to it. I went to BMCC again from 1992 - 1995. I was able to get an associate's degree in Liberal Arts in June, 1995 that quickly because of these reasons. I was working at NY Life part-time for about seven months when in college there and met so many cool people at both places. There was one lady at NY Life Insurance Company that I liked and she liked me. When I finished that temporary job she took me out to dinner and kissed me and told me she loved me and was going to miss me. For the next three or four years I would keep in touch with her by stopping by my old job there and it was so nice to have made such a close friend like her. My mother was constantly cooking for my brother which she hadn't done in years. She used like to go out to dinner almost always before then, but when my brother was very sick he preferred to invite most of these people over to his penthouse and entertain them, so my mother would cook whatever he wanted for himself, his friends and us. I used to spend time with my mother in the kitchen because she was so stressed out and hurt by all that happening to him right before our eyes and at a relatively younger age to be dying, that I couldn't leave her alone too much. I would serve everybody and her dinner or whatever meal we were having and I would clean up everything after the entertaining was done so she wouldn't have to work so hard. I was told by my brother that the main reason I was living in NYC, as far as he was concerned, was to take care of my mom while my mom was taking care of him. My mother was so worried about him and she was in her seventies by that time and it broke her heart every time my brother would get sick and I mean violently sick. I was shocked by the whole situation. I didn't know that much about the disease and had to learn an awful lot about it just like my mother did in order to take care of him and not catch it ourselves. When he would go into the hospital or see one of his many different types of doctors, they would explain the epidemiology and so on and so forth. I found it absolutely horrifying and I was real lucky not to get it from his body fluids, etc. It got to the point very quickly, after I got there, that we didn't care anymore about catching it ourselves because we were trying to save his life or at least keep him alive until better medications came along. He was on all kinds of drug thingytails and my mother would administer them to him, sometimes she would have to crush them with an sthingy-like instrument into powder and mix them with ginger ale or gatorade or something to drink because he would get dehydrated very easily from sweating so much and from the other diseases he had due to the breakdown of his immune system. I even had to learn how to give him his medications, too. There still was so much unknown or unproven about HIV/AIDS in 1992 and 1993 that when he was in the hospital many of the hospital staff would wear masks, aprons and hairnet type garments so that they looked like astronauts to me. Here my mother and I had none of these medical supplies until they finally started telling us to wear gloves and masks, etc. After I learned more about the disease I said I don't need that stuff I'm not going to catch it from his blood unless I have a cut or wound of some sort on myself. So, I would always make sure that I wasn't bleeding from my hands or face, etc., etc., etc. I informed my mother of these facts and so did my brother. She started doing the same, too. At that time, there weren't effective treatments for the disease and no cure. There were so many people whom had died from it already, especially in NYC, or had attained it already that it became an all out panic for everybody involved to get better treatments and step up the campaigns and protests to the medical society and other institutions here in this country and other countries to start making things that worked, i.e., a vaccination against catching it in the first place, protease inhibitors came along about three years after my brother died and so many other people around the world did, too. I used to go on AIDS Walks with him and some of his friends and they got me involved in Act Up or Act Now, something like that, where we would picket outside alot of medical institutions and government bureaucracies. In 1992, after I left NY Life, I went to work for Cravath, Swaine and Moore, Inc. which was one of the eight largest law firms in the country at the time. I worked there for another seven or eight moths in the law library they had in their building as a law librarian assistant. That was a temporary job, too. Yet, when my eight months were over my supervisor offered me a full-time position in the law library but I had to turn it down because my brother was too sick, my mother needed me and I was already going part-time to BMCC. Then, I went to work for Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal in 1992 right after working at Cravath, Swaine and Moore because it was another part-time job and I had more time to be with my family and study than if I were working full-time. I may have the years slightly off but that all happened around that time. I worked right across the street from the World Trade Center in the World Financial Center Building One, I think. There were five buildings in the World Financial Center, World Financial One was mainly comprised of Dow Jones, World Financial Two was Merrill Lynch, World Financial Three was American Express, World Financial Four was Merrill Lynch (again) and World Financial Five was the Atrium. To be continued since my mother said to me way back then, I had to climb the corporate ladder once more to make my brother proud of me before he passed away...
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I was picked up at the train station by my mother and one of my brother's pals. That guy who picked me up had a rent controlled apartment in the western side of Greenwich Village. I lived almost directly across the street from St. Vincent's Hospital when I moved into his apartment that night. He went to live with another close pal of my brother. My mother was already taking care of and living with my brother whom had full blown AIDS by the time I got there. What a horrible surprise that was?!?! I knew he was sick, however not that he had was going to die within a very short period of time. He said, the average was for someone with his t-cell/white blood cell count to live was two years or less. So, I'm living about six blocks away from him and doing all sorts of chores so he could continue to work. I mean I had to grocery shop, water the outdoor garden of his penthouse in the East Village (which took about two hours since it was so big), go to all these formal events with powerful people he knew in NY and spend the night with him in his hospital room for days sometimes weeks at a time trying to take care of him when the nurses were busy and he was afraid and alone at nighttime especially. I mean what a nightmare. I got a job within three months of living there at NY Life Insurance Company in Gramercy Park. I used to walk to work and back to his penthouse or the hospital during that time unless he was in a hospital that wasn't close enough and I would take public transportation then. Next, I applied and got accepted to a few universities in the City Universities of New York (CUNY.) I decided on BMCC again, since it was so tediously difficult to have all my previous transcripts from other colleges sent to other universities that I hadn't attended before and I had already gone to college there so I had a lot of credits that didn't need to be transferred to it. I went to BMCC again from 1992 - 1995. I was able to get an associate's degree in Liberal Arts in June, 1995 that quickly because of these reasons. I was working at NY Life part-time for about seven months when in college there and met so many cool people at both places. There was one lady at NY Life Insurance Company that I liked and she liked me. When I finished that temporary job she took me out to dinner and kissed me and told me she loved me and was going to miss me. For the next three or four years I would keep in touch with her by stopping by my old job there and it was so nice to have made such a close friend like her. My mother was constantly cooking for my brother which she hadn't done in years. She used like to go out to dinner almost always before then, but when my brother was very sick he preferred to invite most of these people over to his penthouse and entertain them, so my mother would cook whatever he wanted for himself, his friends and us. I used to spend time with my mother in the kitchen because she was so stressed out and hurt by all that happening to him right before our eyes and at a relatively younger age to be dying, that I couldn't leave her alone too much. I would serve everybody and her dinner or whatever meal we were having and I would clean up everything after the entertaining was done so she wouldn't have to work so hard. I was told by my brother that the main reason I was living in NYC, as far as he was concerned, was to take care of my mom while my mom was taking care of him. My mother was so worried about him and she was in her seventies by that time and it broke her heart every time my brother would get sick and I mean violently sick. I was shocked by the whole situation. I didn't know that much about the disease and had to learn an awful lot about it just like my mother did in order to take care of him and not catch it ourselves. When he would go into the hospital or see one of his many different types of doctors, they would explain the epidemiology and so on and so forth. I found it absolutely horrifying and I was real lucky not to get it from his body fluids, etc. It got to the point very quickly, after I got there, that we didn't care anymore about catching it ourselves because we were trying to save his life or at least keep him alive until better medications came along. He was on all kinds of drug thingytails and my mother would administer them to him, sometimes she would have to crush them with an sthingy-like instrument into powder and mix them with ginger ale or gatorade or something to drink because he would get dehydrated very easily from sweating so much and from the other diseases he had due to the breakdown of his immune system. I even had to learn how to give him his medications, too. There still was so much unknown or unproven about HIV/AIDS in 1992 and 1993 that when he was in the hospital many of the hospital staff would wear masks, aprons and hairnet type garments so that they looked like astronauts to me. Here my mother and I had none of these medical supplies until they finally started telling us to wear gloves and masks, etc. After I learned more about the disease I said I don't need that stuff I'm not going to catch it from his blood unless I have a cut or wound of some sort on myself. So, I would always make sure that I wasn't bleeding from my hands or face, etc., etc., etc. I informed my mother of these facts and so did my brother. She started doing the same, too. At that time, there weren't effective treatments for the disease and no cure. There were so many people whom had died from it already, especially in NYC, or had attained it already that it became an all out panic for everybody involved to get better treatments and step up the campaigns and protests to the medical society and other institutions here in this country and other countries to start making things that worked, i.e., a vaccination against catching it in the first place, protease inhibitors came along about three years after my brother died and so many other people around the world did, too. I used to go on AIDS Walks with him and some of his friends and they got me involved in Act Up or Act Now, something like that, where we would picket outside alot of medical institutions and government bureaucracies. In 1992, after I left NY Life, I went to work for Cravath, Swaine and Moore, Inc. which was one of the eight largest law firms in the country at the time. I worked there for another seven or eight moths in the law library they had in their building as a law librarian assistant. That was a temporary job, too. Yet, when my eight months were over my supervisor offered me a full-time position in the law library but I had to turn it down because my brother was too sick, my mother needed me and I was already going part-time to BMCC. Then, I went to work for Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal in 1992 right after working at Cravath, Swaine and Moore because it was another part-time job and I had more time to be with my family and study than if I were working full-time. I may have the years slightly off but that all happened around that time. I worked right across the street from the World Trade Center in the World Financial Center Building One, I think. There were five buildings in the World Financial Center, World Financial One was mainly comprised of Dow Jones, World Financial Two was Merrill Lynch, World Financial Three was American Express, World Financial Four was Merrill Lynch (again) and World Financial Five was the Atrium. To be continued since my mother said to me way back then, I had to climb the corporate ladder once more to make my brother proud of me before he passed away...