Here’s how we paid for the copier repair
We were in Florida during the holidays and visited with Carol Williams, our first HIV nurse at Community Health Network.
We haven't seen each other for a while. We told stories and bored our husbands, but it was fun to reminisce.
At lunch in Florida, Bill Valenti and Carol Williams remembered the early days in the HIV epidemic. Provided by Dr. Bill Valenti
We remembered two stories in particular.
One was about how broke we were in the early days of Community Health Network. There were weeks where Steve Scheibel and I would hold back on our salaries so we could pay staff.
We talked about that, and we talked about the day when the copier broke and we needed to pay the repair person.
When we first opened in 1989, we saved the copayments from our first two patients.
One was a $5 bill because the patient had a certain insurance plan and the other was a $10 bill from a patient who had a different kind of insurance.
We put the two payments in a frame and hung the frame over the copier A lot of our office supplies and furniture in those days was donated, and a retiring doc had donated the copier to us. Even though it was old, it still worked and it came with a service contract so that the service visits would be under warranty.
One day the copier wasn't working and the service man had to come. He did his work and then said, “That's $15 for parts.”
I looked in my wallet. I was broke because I hadn't been paid in a couple of weeks.
You probably know where this is going.
Above me on the wall was $15 that we had framed.
Now that the copier was working, we took the bills down, copied the bills and put the copies back in the frame and gave the $15 to the copier guy.
Carol also reminded me of two patients that became some of her favorites.
For the most part over her many years, she didn’t really develop social connections with patients. But it was different with Chuck and Ron.
During their illness, Carol became friendly with them and stopped by their house to visit. Like any good friend, she would help out when they needed assistance.
One of those times was written in a letter from Chuck to Carol, thanking her to get him and Ron set medically so that they could travel during the holiday season to visit Chuck's parents.
He talked in the letter about how much both of them enjoyed the visit and said that this would be the last time that they saw them.
And I thought to myself, that just doesn't happen these days. It's just different. The AIDS epidemic brought people together in ways that we didn't always anticipate. But it brought people together in meaningful ways, whether it was taking money off the wall to pay for a copier repair or getting two patients to see their parents for the last time.