The living face of AIDS

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, May 24, 2001

Robert Rodriguez wants to tell students his story

By Janice Podsada

Herald Writer

MUKILTEO — Robert Rodriguez has one request — please let your sixth- or ninth- or twelfth-grader hear him talk.

Please don’t sign a permission slip excusing your child from attending their school’s AIDS assembly, he said.

Kids who miss his message?

"I worry about them," he said.

Rodriguez has been talking about AIDS to local groups since 1995. He wants everyone to know AIDS is still with us.

AIDS is a difficult disease to manage. The combination of "miracle" drugs that he takes to keep the virus at bay has taken a terrible toll.

He’s glad the drugs now exist, but their side effects have put him in the hospital for a month at a time.

Rodriguez, 44, a Mukilteo resident, has been infected with the virus that causes AIDS for more than 20 years. He is a long-term survivor, which is unusual.

Public health officials believe the AIDS virus has existed in the United States since at least the mid to late 1970s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But it wasn’t until 1982 that officials began using the term "acquired immunodeficiency syndrome" or AIDS, to describe the occurrences of opportunistic infections.

Rodriguez and 10 other AIDS speakers will be busy talking to elementary school, middle school and high school students from Edmonds to Lynnwood to Arlington from now until the end of the school year.

The presentations are sponsored by the Snohomish Health District’s speakers bureau.

Speakers usually are known only by their first names. Except for Rodriguez.

"I want to tell people who I am," he said this week.

Rodriguez was born a hemophiliac; his blood does not clot. He sometimes requires blood transfusions. In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, blood products were not tested for the virus, and he got the disease through a transfusion.

He was married when he learned he was infected with the AIDS virus. His wife was pregnant with his second child. Fortunately, neither his wife, nor his son or daughter, were infected.

But the disease broke up his family, he said. The pressure was too great.

In 1994, he watched his 34-year-old brother, also a hemophiliac, die of AIDS. He vowed to get the word out. "No one should have to suffer with this disease," he said. It was time to talk to anyone and everyone. Along the way, he found the speakers bureau.

Ironically, he brings the deadly AIDS virus to life. A cherubic-looking man, he looks healthy and fit.

"I have the perfect face for it," he said. "I don’t look sick."

Kids respond. They write him thank-you letters after hearing him talk about his life.

"It helps us so much to hear it from a real person. We don’t hear the whole story when we read the magazines or watch it on the news," an Edmonds ninth-grader recently wrote.

If a school or a group calls the health district with a request for someone to talk about AIDS, "we can send one of our speakers," said Suzanne Pate, health district spokeswoman.

"These are not professional educators, these are people who tell their personal story," Pate said.

They are credible speakers, either infected with AIDS or affected by the disease, said Jessica Burt, HIV health educator with the health district.

The speakers bureau, which formed in 1990, serves Snohomish County.

"They give the disease a face. Here is a real person," Burt said. "It dispels a lot of myths — who gets it and what they look like."

Carl Schubbe, director of the learning center at the Center for Career Alternatives in Everett, recently invited the health district’s AIDS speakers to talk to center clients.

They spoke there this week.

Avoiding AIDS is a critical life skill, Schubbe said.

"Our clients are between the ages of 14 and 21. They tend to think they’re immortal," Schubbe said.

"Without a face, AIDS is just a statistic."

You can call Herald Writer Janice Podsada at 425-339-3029 or send e-mail to podsada@heraldnet.com.