A Netflix ad came up for Bohemian Rhapsody movie and I shared it on FB because it gave me chills. It was the scene where they were in the studio and came up with the stomp-stomp-clap that opens We Will Rock You and then cuts to the concert in MSG. I’ve seen it twice now and may make it a hat trick after seeing this. It was so well done, no bullshit. Didn’t make him out to be a vapid whore. Just the tragic facts of a man who loved. I saw that story over and over and over again, working at SF General in 1982-84. It hurts to think about it, even now.

A few years ago I watched Rent for the first time and had to stop the movie and totally lost my shit before being able to return to it. Had not really dealt with those memories until that moment and maybe still haven’t. There’s a documentary out about SFGH at that time and I’ve not been able to bring myself to watch it. I know from the trailers that people interviewed were on our team of docs, nurses, respiratory therapists, medical social workers PTs, OTs, housekeeping and maintenance people for that matter. We were all deep down terrified but not when we worked with the patients (not all gay men, plenty of IV drug abusers). We did our jobs in faith and love.

Many years ago a counselor told me that most war stories are written ten years after the end of the war, It takes at least that long to process. It’s been 40 for me, although I may have written here before. I was 28 years old, a new grad. Never mind the rest of the trauma center – burned babies in the burn unit, 35 year old men with a sudden burst aneurysm ( I still remember his traumatized mother sitting there in ICU. I was a new mother myself. It was unfathomable), the young woman I worked with for three months who jumped from a building to commit suicide (but didn’t go high enough, causing her tibia to ram into her femur and her femur into her pelvis), the inmates in the jail ward who had committed terrible crimes but with the prison officer next to them called me ma’am, the man whose “friends” decided he needed another round or maybe wanted to kill him and shot heroin into his carotid, the endless victims of auto and motorcycle wrecks….never mind all that.

It is the AIDS that haunts me to this day. These men were my age. They were my neighbors (we lived just blocks from “the Castro”), my real estate agent, my husband’s employee. They shared my interests, camping, music, we danced with them in the clubs. When we arrived in SF as newlyweds the gay scene was fun and dancing and love. Within a year the tidal wave of horror caused a pall to fall over the Castro. A spot of Karposi’s sarcoma on my husbands’s employee’s face broke our hearts. He was 25. He, and we, knew what it meant. In the hospital, the gay population began to systematically die before my eyes- the fear in their young eyes is what haunts me. The goal of our therapy was to strengthen them enough that they could go home with their partners to die. As if that weren’t bad enough, the IV drug users with AIDS started to populate the hospital. I remember a young woman especially whose open wounds from infected needles it was my job to cleanse, and oh, by the way, to not infect myself.

Better writers than I have documented this time in our history. It will take another 10, 20, 30, 40 before the health professionals who worked with Covid-19 can tell their stories. When Covid hit, it all came rushing back. Every time I think I’ve “dealt with it” – something comes along to remind me. In this case Rami Malek channeling Freddie Mercury, the most shocking loss of all. Just like the epidemic, his death crept up on us, and we’ve never been the same. It rocked us, and now all we have left is the memory, which still rocks me.