Richard came to the Cohen House in 1996; he is now 52 years old. He grew up in the Back Bay district of Boston and worked for the Federal Reserve all over the country before taking an early retirement in the late 1980s. His hands and grip are strong, though he walks with a cane.
When Richard settled in San Francisco in 1993, he was showing signs of HIV infection, but had not yet developed full-blown AIDS.
"It was scary back then," he says. "I ended up volunteering for every
program and clinical test study I could over at the General Hospital."
In late 1994, Richard came down with Progressive Multifocal
Leucoencephalopathy (PML), a rare viral infection of the brain, and was
given six months to live. Over those six months, he became too sick to
care for himself, and his partner left him.
Six months became two years, and Richard bounced between several
different temporary care facilities in San Francisco, eventually ending
up back with his partner at a condominium on Pine Street, receiving
care at California Pacific Medical Center. Richard relapsed and his
partner left again. Richard went back to the hospital, unable to live
on his own.
Medicaid was unwilling to pay for the round-the-clock care and
chemotherapy that Richard needed, and when he came close to being
kicked out to the street, his name came up on the waiting list for the
Cohen House.
"Coming here was a hard decision," he says. "Because if I could stay at
the hospital, I knew that I wouldn’t die. But, when I came here for
the first time, I knew that I could live here."
When he got to Cohen, Richard was put on the very first generation of
protease inhibitors (an anti-AIDS drug cocktail). Those, combined with
the attention that the Cohen staff provided, helped keep Richard
going.
When Richard came to Cohen, residents were dying at a rate of one and
two per month, and the house functioned primarily as a hospice. Today,
he has lived here longer than all but one other resident; a testimony
to the kind of advanced care and support that the Cohen House provides.
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