Candles in the wind

Anne Hosier

Friday, May 15, 1998 | 9:19 a.m.

The respiratory problems and sense of fatigue were the first signs that something was amiss.

But Billie Van Noy's grown daughter, Laurie, told her mother that it was just her allergies acting up.

It was only after Laurie's symptoms worsened and her health began to rapidly deteriorate that Van Noy learned the truth: Her daughter had received tainted blood during surgery on a blocked intestine a decade earlier, and now was suffering from AIDS.

The news devastated Van Noy, who had moved to Las Vegas only weeks earlier to care for Laurie's brother, Roy, who had contracted HIV through sexual contact and now lay dying of the disease.

"It was rough," Van Noy says of the final days of Roy's illness in the spring of 1996 -- a few months after Laurie's death. "I was praying, 'Let this be over,' because I knew he wasn't going to come out of it." By the end of April, Roy, too, was gone.

"They were good kids," Van Noy says wistfully. "I was lucky to have them."

On Sunday evening, Van Noy will honor the memory of her only two children during the 15th annual International Candlelight Memorial at UNLV. Their names will be read aloud, along with those of hundreds of other local AIDS victims, during a candlelight procession on the campus.

The procession will begin at UNLV's Valerie Pida Plaza and end near the Rod Lee Bigelow Health Sciences building, where plans for a new AIDS memorial garden will be unveiled.

Originally conceived as a rose garden, the site is now expected to feature more cost-effective, native desert plants, according to Kay Velardo of Community Counseling Center. "The ground will be dedicated, and then over the course of the next couple of months, the plants will be planted."

People in more than 400 other cities in the United States, India and Latin America will stage similar events in honor of the disease's victims, in what has become the largest grassroots AIDS event in the world.

"It actually began as a political statement," Velardo says. She began attending the event in Las Vegas 11 years ago -- the year before she lost her brother, Brent Boozer, to the disease.

"(AIDS activists) asked people throughout the country to put blue lights or blue candles in their windows. It was to make people aware of AIDS and to protest the lack of response by our government to the whole issue of AIDS," she says.

Global proportions

A lot has changed in the years since AIDS first began making headlines in the U.S.: Public awareness of the disease has risen considerably thanks to the efforts of AIDS activists throughout the country, and the rate of infection in this country has slowed.

"Nationally, new cases have started dropping off in the last couple of years," says Rick Reich, AIDS services coordinator for the Clark County Health District, who compiles and analyzes statistics.

Here in Clark County, where the rate of reported AIDS cases last year -- 31.8 per 100,000 people -- hovered below the national average of 32 per 100,000. "It's actually been harder and harder to find new HIV cases," he says.

As a result of innovative new treatments and drug combinations, the number of AIDS deaths is also down nationwide, and the projected lifespan of a person diagnosed with AIDS has increased from about a year from diagnosis to more than a decade.

"Because of the protease inhibitors and drug cocktails, people are living longer and more productively," says Velardo, whose brother lived only 16 months beyond his diagnosis. "Now we have a lot more combinations of drugs that are a lot more helpful."

Yet amid these encouraging signs come some new concerns about the disease.

Developing nations, such as those in Sub-Saharan Africa where more than 20 million people are infected with HIV, continue to be ravaged by AIDS, according to statistics released last December by the United Nations Joint Programme on AIDS, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The spread of the disease appears to be continuing worldwide at an alarming rate, with an estimated 16,000 new infections occurring each day, the statistics show.

In the U.S., health care planners are struggling to cope with the rising number of infected people seeking care -- a legacy of the drop in AIDS deaths, Reich says. "If you lose less and less people each year, but continue to add new infections into the pot, gradually you begin piling these people up in the medical delivery system."

News of recent medical advancements and the declining rate of infection also has some activists worried that the public is giving up the fight too soon. (The theme of this year's memorial, "Rekindle the flame; Renew the fight for a global end to AIDS," reflects that concern.)

"There's still this attitude that it's not going to happen to us because there has been so much research and so much work toward (combating) AIDS," Velardo says. "The disease has kind of gone into the background. We've become complacent."

"It's kind of like a cut," Reich adds. "You keep the pressure on and it will stop bleeding. But take the band-aid off, and release the pressure, and it'll start bleeding again."

Shoulders to lean on

Joe Duran, for one, would like to see more public attention focussed on AIDS. Last spring he lost his younger brother, Daniel, to the disease. "I miss his sense of humor," Duran says. "We had a lot of laughs."

Daniel contracted HIV more than a decade ago after having sex with an infected person who offered him the vague disclaimer that he "had antibodies."

"The biggest cause of AIDS is ignorance," Duran says. Back then, people "weren't as knowledgeable as we are today."

Velardo agrees that public awareness of the disease has risen considerably since 1987, when her brother was first diagnosed with HIV.

"I look back and I think how very different it was in many ways," she says. "It was very horrible. There was less information, less education and a lot more fear. And it was extremely difficult for all of us, because it was 'the big secret' and we had to be very quiet about it. And that just intensified the whole problem."

One incident in particular stands out in Velardo's mind: The day she opened the Las Vegas Sun and saw a letter to the editor from "a very hateful person" who wrote that people with AIDS " 'deserve it, let them rot,' " Velardo says. "I had just buried my brother."

In Van Noy's case, the hate and prejudice came from someone more familiar: her daughter's husband.

"He was in a church group that believed that AIDS was a sign of God getting even with you," she says. "Finally he just kicked (Laurie) out of the house and she went to live with a girlfriend. He felt this was the 'Christian' thing to do. I felt it was very un-Christian."

Van Noy took comfort, however, in the tight community of AIDS activists in Las Vegas that rallied around her in the final days of her children's illness. A group of eight took turns sitting by Roy's side and offering their support.

"I don't think I could have survived without the help from his friends," Van Noy, who now volunteers at Pedregal House, a place for HIV-infected people, says.

A similar group of people from a local hospice helped Duran cope with his brother's final days, during which Daniel lost much of his body weight, his hair, even his eyesight. Duran took such comfort from the hospice volunteers' presence that he's now planning to volunteer his time there. "They certainly were there when we were in need."

On Sunday, Duran will attend the AIDS candlelight memorial for the first time. "I didn't even know they had a memorial," he confesses.

"(But) it's something I'm proud to be a part of."

archive