acz blast from the past: brad biggers from the suicide prevention line in louisiana, january 2005

. . . three suicide calls in 2 hours is certainly a stressful event. They all are running together in my mind right now. Let me think about if I can sort out which was which.

The first one was one of our most common kinds of suicide call: the "I just found out I have HIV and my life is over" call. These calls are not easy. Living with AIDS or HIV means completely changing your life, which is often enough to make it feel like your life is over. You also have to overcome the stigma attached to AIDS, and make the choice of if and when to tell your friends and family, and what to do about your previous partners, and how to confront the person who you think gave it to you.

It truly shakes your world from the ground up, and it's more than some people can take (although a third of Americans living with HIV or AIDS say that their quality of life actually improved following their diagnosis. Meanwhile, a third said their life was about the same, and a third said their life was worse, and the result is that sometimes an HIV diagnosis makes people want to kill themselves. Many of those who do end up calling us.

My second one for the day was an uncommon one. The young woman who called us did not have any sort of AIDS related concern. Her husband had died three years ago, and her only child died in a car crash while driving home from spending Thanksgiving dinner with the caller. Basically she called us because when she opened up her phone book, she saw the words "trained counselors" next to our number, and so she called. It was my first non-AIDS related suicide call since I stopped volunteering at the suicide hotline, but Brianna told me she had taken two or three calls like that before.

The final call was by far the hardest. The caller was first diagnosed with HIV in 1984, and progressed to full blown AIDS in 1987. Back then he lived in New York, where he became active in HIV outreach among other young gay males. Many of his HIV positive friends did the same, however the last of them died in 1995, at which point he left New York for Louisiana, hoping to make a difference here. He became the associate director of an AIDS service organization in Shreveport before quitting to found his own clinic in a rural area with a disproportionate number of low income people with AIDS.

His health took a turn for the worse this past spring, 19 years after he was first infected with HIV. His temporary leave of absence from work soon became a permanent one, and he went under the care of his local hospice on November first.

For those of you who aren't familiar with hospice programs, they are set up to aid victims of terminal illness when they have less than a year to live. The ones I've had experience with are wonderful, caring organizations that make a tremendous difference to the patients they serve. Unfortunately, going into hospice care made my caller feel like his struggle with AIDS was nearing an end, and that he was tired of fighting. He was prepared to down a bottle of pain pills and wash it down with whiskey. Fortunately he did not. After 45 minutes on the phone with him, he agreed to call the hospice and let them know how he was feeling, and to call us back if he couldn't reach them or if he needed someone to talk to again. By that time my day was over, and I was ready to stop answering calls.

I hope my three callers are doing okay tonight.

[brad biggers]