Who is going to hire you, knowing who you are?" I said, "What are you going to be doing," and he said, "I'm working at Maui's Skateboard shop." I said, "Really? What are you going to be doing?" and he said, "I'm going to put together skateboards." And I said, "How much are you getting paid?" and he said "$3.50 an hour." I said, "Ryan, that won't even buy your gas to Indianapolis and back." He said, "Mom, you don't get it. It was kind of funny, he came home once after he turned 16 and told me he had a job for the summer.
And it was all because of a young girl, named Jill Stuart, who was president of the student body, who decided to bring in the medical experts and talk to the kids, and the kids went home then and educated their parents. Then we moved to Cicero, Indiana, and there the community welcomed us. That somehow, someway he had done something he shouldn't have done or he wouldn't have gotten AIDS. It was God's punishment, we heard the "God's punishment" a lot. People were really cruel, people said that he had to be gay, that he had to have done something bad or wrong, or he wouldn't have had it. Through court hearings, we thought it would take one court hearing, and we'd have all these medical experts in so to speak, and then everybody would be educated, but it didn't happen that way. He was worried about taking the seventh grade over again, and he didn't want people to think he was dumb, because he was a very smart and intelligent kid. We had to go through almost a year and a half, he didn't go to school for about a year and a half. I want to see my friends." So I really kind of put him off for a while and finally he just said, "Mom, I want to go to school. And I really never thought he'd be healthy enough to go to school.īut as he started getting healthy, as he started gaining weight, he started to ask, "Mom," he said, "I want to go to school. So at that time, I thought every cough, every fever, I worried that it was going to be his last. When Ryan was diagnosed, they only gave him three to six months to live.
Ryan really became famous because of his fight to go to school. It became apparent just like overnight that all of a sudden things were different.
And all of a sudden the CDC shows up and the CDC started putting in all kinds of precautions, you know: the gowns, the gloves, the masks, and so forth, and started talking to the nurses and so forth. There were no precautions at the hospital. I really never really believed he had AIDS for quite a while.Īt that time, of course, he had no precautions or anything. I felt like, "How could he have AIDS?" He was a hemophiliac since birth, and I just felt like "How could he be one of the first ones?" I felt like somehow, in some way, it was going to be something else. So I was living in Kokomo, Indiana, and Ryan was attending Western Middle School, and it was something that I really didn't even believe he had.
He was one of the first children-one of the first hemophiliacs-to come down with AIDS, and it was definitely a time when there was no education and there was hardly any information on AIDS at the time. Ryan White was diagnosed with AIDS on December 17, 1984. Ryan’s mom, Jeanne White Ginder, recounts the early years of struggle, pain, and triumph. Congress passed the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act in August 1990. He died in April 1990, one month before his high school graduation. Surprising his doctors, Ryan lived five years longer than expected. He gained national attention and became the face of public education about the disease. Along with his mother Jeanne White Ginder, he rallied for his right to attend school. When Ryan tried to return to school, he faced AIDS-related discrimination in his Indiana community. Living in Kokomo, Indiana, doctors gave him six months to live. Ryan White was 13 when he was diagnosed with AIDS after a blood transfusion in December 1984.
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