Miami Herald - Tuesday, December 02, 2003
Nicholas Spangler, spangler@herald.com

"Then they all just slide down."

Practical advice on World AIDS Day from Roslyn Allen, 52, who is no epidemiologist but an expert nonetheless: a 10-year survivor.

The city of Miami was having a memorial service for the AIDS dead at the Torch of Friendship -- a stage, a Christmas tree and a couple hundred folding chairs set out on the concrete -- and Allen got there early. Her sister, her niece and a friend are dead because of AIDS, so she didn't want to miss this.

She herself looked OK, a little tired under the eyes maybe, but OK. "God has truly been good to me," she said, and maybe He has. Her T-cell count is back up above 600 -- the low end of the normal range -- from a low of 200. She fought off a bad case of pneumonia last year. And a few months back, when the Interferon gave her diarrhea and nausea and vertigo and she vomited up everything, she survived that, too.

She thinks she got HIV from an old boyfriend. She was a fine creature in her day. "Fine like wine," she said.

But the drugs melted away the flesh on her legs and breasts and redistributed it to her gut and the back of her neck. To top that off, she can't do her exercise anymore -- no more 5 a.m. sunrise power walks in Cole Park. She doesn't have the energy, and the drugs make her bones ache and her toes curl back.

They told her 10 years ago she had HIV, but she didn't believe. "We can't accept your blood anymore," said the woman at the blood bank. "It's been good enough for a year," Allen said, playing the outrage card. "You're mixing me up with someone else."

Then a year later, in another building in a room with two chairs and one desk, they told her again, and this time she believed. She started to scream.

"All I could think of was dying," she said. "I am going to die -- that kept running in my head."

Now she has good days and bad; on the bad days, she stays to herself. And they come more often than she wants to admit.

But God's been good.

She went back to school in 1995, got an A.S. to be a legal assistant. Three years later, she got a B.S. in public administration. In two weeks -- on Dec. 13 -- she'll get her Master's in human-resource development.

She'll be looking for a job then. "Time to start putting all these degrees to work," she said. "Gotta make me some money."

The guests arrived, middle-aged and orderly, and their number didn't quite fill the seats. They were almost all black American and Hispanic. After all, these are the new faces of AIDS.

The numbers are on the rise again, and minorities are getting hit hardest all over the country, but especially in Florida and in Miami: the AIDS capital of the state.

Tourists from cruise ships walked on by and the evening commuters sped down Biscayne Boulevard. It was cold when the karaoke singers took the stage, when the interpretive dance began and politicians gave their homilies.

"In the beginning, in '94, there were a lot more people that would come out to something like this," Allen said. "Those gay white boys, they fought. My people, they'd rather die in silence. But I don't give a damn. I want to live."

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