LJ Idol Topic 11: Sexual Healing

Penicillin

Erythromycin

Doxycycline

Tetracycline

 

These are the drugs that my grandfather used to heal people.

 

He was an epidemiologist working for the state department of health with a concentration in the prevention and control of STDs.

 

When I was a teenager, he took me to work with him one day. I think it was his way of explaining things to me, making me understand that with great sex comes great responsibility. What I saw that day were multitudes of people lined up in front of his office. Some were regulars, some were new - each one getting a discreet test, a comforting hand on the shoulder, some pills, some sage advice and a handful of condoms. I saw nurses who loved him, who joked with him, who worked diligently by his side.

 

He spoke to the community - speaking to the Rotary Club, the Lions Club, the local university, the medical community - trying to make people see that sexually transmitted diseases were unfortunately common-place and could easily be prevented by education and safer practices.  Teaching people that one couldn’t get HIV/AIDS from a toilet seat, training on proper preventative measures, and that talking freely and openly about sex and STDs was a good and healthy thing.

 

He never talked to me about his patients, never told me their stories. He was a stickler for keeping confidentiality and never taking his work home. I know that he lost patients, I know that he went to their funerals.

 

He retired in 1989 after we all knew what HIV/AIDS was, after he realized that he was just one man in a fight for millions, afraid of what the overabundance of antibiotics was doing to the fight on the spread of disease, an old dog tired of fighting the bureaucracy of state and federal agencies, tired of watching politicians play with peoples’ lives.

 

When he died in 2003, there were so many people at his wake that there wasn’t enough room in the sanctuary. People that were his regulars, his nurses, his co-workers came to pay their respects to the man that treated them with respect and dignity.