The women gather every Wednesday afternoon at Cook County Hospital. Today they’re in a conference room, the fourth meeting place they’ve had in the last two months. Space is precious at the hospital, and nonmedical activities must yield to the demands of the critically ill. So this support group has yet to find a lasting home. The 15 women who are here sit in a kind of semicircle. A few are white or Hispanic, the majority are black. They range in age from mid-20s to mid-50s. Some appear to be poor, some middle-class. Several are accompanied by small children.
Florence, who has five children, says she has been sober for two years but admits to a continuing drug problem. “At least I’m OK today,” she says. Murmurs of guarded approval.
“I don’t have that negative attitude these days,” says still another. “I’d say my life is shaping up better than ever.” An older woman says “Tell it, girl.”
“Yes, but that’s just the trouble,” says another woman. “Men don’t want to be bothered with that stuff.”
“You have to insist they use it,” she says. “In fact, you may have to put it on him yourself. You do not want to infect him or get your own self reinfected.”
Cohen, now the program director, has been a general internist at County Hospital for 15 years. From her earliest days on duty, she says, she has seen how overwhelmed the hospital is and how ill equipped it is to deal with the special needs of women who are HIV-positive or who have the symptoms of AIDS-related complex (ARC) or full-blown AIDS. “These people were coming through here, and we were seeing them all the time. You can’t avoid that at an institution where 6,000 women deliver babies every year. All over the city we could see a growing concentration of services for gay men and IV drug users who were HIV positive–but nothing for women. AIDS was first and foremost a men’s disease.” As a result, she says, women were “slinking through clinics,” getting misdiagnosed or thinking they were the only person in the world who had ever tested positive.
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Cohen, a short, very direct woman of 39, is not the long-suffering type. She is forceful, determined, and extremely knowledgeable about health-care issues–her conversation is sprinkled with terms such as “entitlements,” “vectors,” and “punitive modalities.” When the most persuasive arguments of Cohen and Sherer failed to persuade Cook County Hospital officials to fully fund the special project, the duo approached large charitable foundations. They obtained a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to set up WCAP as a kind of all-purpose clinic and service provider. It is now into its third year.
