“What do you do in the city?”

“I work out here at San Francisco General as a Phlebotomist. It basically means I’m a medical assistant that does what nurses don’t want to do. Draw blood, do inter-muscular injections, take vital signs, and do a ton of paperwork.”

“How long you been doing that?”

“Almost 5 years actually.”

“Seems kinda heavy.”

“Um, I work in a clinical research ward here at the General for UCSF and it can be kind of taxing because the main focus right now is HIV. You meet some really sick people, and you meet some people who in theory should be really sick and they’re not. We’re on the verge of some really crazy stuff in that field right now, they’re effectively curing children with HIV, which is really really awesome. It’s been making big waves, the problem is the people who have been living with it for 35 years are wondering when their relax and lose the anxiety moment is coming. It’s brilliant and sickening at the same time. It’s nice to work and feel like you’re part of that process, and to be with patients on a day to day basis. Some of them have the money to change the world, but the can’t change the world as they know it. There’s tiny moments when you appreciate who you are and what you’ve done, and then there’s moments where you kick yourself and wish you could be doing more. Realistically you can’t. It’s shitty to deal with those patients who wanna get healthy because according to the Pharmaceutical companies we represent and research for, they should be healthy and they’re not.”

“What is it about the people that ‘shouldn’t be healthy but are’ sets them apart? Is it something about their mindset? Are they spiritual?”

“Pretty much all of patients have a karmic belief that what they do unto others will come back around. But most of them feel abandoned because they were from a family that was Catholic or Christian and they lost family members because they’re not welcome in their family anymore. That’s a hard part of dealing with these HIV cases because it’s a 99.99% possibility that someone in their family has turned their back on them. A lot of people’s stances is that this is something they willed on themselves by having sex with a man. When you work with them you’re supposed to be there on a medical capacity, but it’s much easier to get involved on an emotional capacity because you immediately feel for them and you ask yourself, ‘If this was me, would I have my support group that I have now?’ It can be very fucking taxing. A lot of them you wish they could have a better life, but you know it’s not going to happen in this lifetime and that’s why they’re there. They feel like it’s worth it to put themselves on the line. Whether it’s for blood draws or lymph biopsies, where they’ll open up the thigh and remove lymph nodes to be sent off to a lab to be studied, or gut biopsies where they go in rectally and take tissue samples from the gut where the HIV reservoirs are. There are huge downsides to participating in this kind of research, from being sore, to building scar tissue in your veins, which makes it difficult to put in IVs. I mean…we do pay them, but it’s absolute shit. And the amount of blood we draw, most people cannot take that much, so we have to stick them 2 and 3 times. They tolerate these things because they think the people that come after them will have a better future. That is the one piece of salvation that you experience in the research world. These people want to leave some positive footprint in their wake. There’s a lot of love in their community to take the chances to maybe…maybe…see a glimmer of hope.

“Wow.”

“And it’s crazy because I feel like I’m never doing enough. When I go on Facebook my friends post shit about palm oil deforestation to Russia banning rainbow flags, you can’t even have one of those without being incarcerated and beaten.”

“You’re doing a lot.”

“In my youth I was just a punk kid who rode a bike and smoked weed. Now I’m older and I want to make sure there’s something that I have done or did do…if nothing else I can say to these patients that somebody does care, and somebody does respect you, and somebody does recognize everything you go through. And I will always be here as long as you’re down to come see me. It’s the toughest job I’ve ever had. I was in the Marines when I was 18, it was a really bad idea, but I wanted money for college, but this is way tougher than that. When I was in the Marines, we were robots. You got up, you showered, if you had to piss or shit you did it right then and there. Everything from that moment after you put your camouflage uniform on, you belonged to somebody else. Everything you did was structured. When you ate and drank was structured. And this job at the General is tougher than that. But again, it’s the small things. At the end of the day, I’m offering these people humanity when so many other people say ‘Fuck it’ and write them off.”

“I hear you.”

“Even the health care system writes them off. If you’re working in a non-research group your job is prescribe, prescribe, prescribe, prescribe. Diagnose and prescribe. We have a pill for everything but we don’t have a cure for anything.”

“Reminds me of Dallas Buyers Club.”

“We have a pill that can help someone with HIV stay alive for 20 years but it kills their liver and kidneys to take that pill. I worked in a regular part of the hospital for about 3 years and now I’ve been in the research part for 2 and a half and it’s literally a total 180. When I do the intake interviews and listen to all the medications people are on I hear cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching. The health care companies pay those pharmaceutical companies thousands of dollars a month to keep these people, what they call “healthy”.

“That’s a lot bro.”

“Yeah I don’t think I could do anything else after this, I’m working on my associates in Biological Sciences to get my RN, once I get my RN I’m jumping right back into clinical research. I don’t want to be part of the group that keeps life at that status quo, I want to be part of the group that makes life better, that makes people excited…things are gonna change. I can feel it.”