That’s just plain rude. A simple response is all you’re asking for.

Boys on the Side and Sister Act. But I do love her as Guinan.

I highly recommend Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green. You can take it just a chapter or even a segment at a time.

It has science in it but it’s not dry at all. It’s almost, but not quite, casual. The book focuses on a specific patient but also talks about the history and current stuff, too.

I’m still somewhat bowled over by the book. It’s horrible that so many people suffer from TB. Here, it’s relatively rare. But in poor countries, it can run rampant.

It is truly a torturous way to die.

You’re less likely to get AIDS than TB from being in the same room as someone with the disease.

Neither disease is shameful. They’re just diseases.

That’s all.

In the early 90s, most people saw AIDS as something shameful. They lied and covered it up.

Some people still think it’s shameful.

Did they ever really have TB? That question can’t be answered for sure now. My mom says she thinks not.

I would think that if they really had TB, we wouldn’t have been allowed around them. But I don’t know for sure.

That was 30 years ago now.

I remember being furious that they were hooked up to tubes and were being given life-extending measures. They’d been on hospice but one of their relatives (someone who who would know the truth) kept talking about them “getting better.” But I kept thinking “there is no getting better.”

Nobody was honest with us about this. To be fair, they weren’t honest with each other about it either, I don’t think.

I eventually found out the truth. I was still young when I found out. I think they were still alive when I found out but maybe not.

I don’t think we kids (I would have been pre-7th grade) were told they’d die, especially not at first. It was just “very sick.” Then it became clear they would not get better.

Eventually, they got pneumonia and passed away at home.

But really? They died from AIDS.

It was the early 90s.

What I was told was that they’d gotten TB from working in the dirt (gardening/maybe landscaping) which now sounds really stupid.

They were “very sick” but we spent a fair bit of time around them. They would eventually die from their illness.

You see, when I was a kid, there was someone I knew and was around a fair bit (an adult) who “had TB.”

No they didn’t. Or maybe, possibly, they did?

The only people who know for sure are dead or have Alzheimer’s.

I wanted to know because something I found out from Everything is Tuberculosis is that TB can live in your body for decades before you “have TB.”

Seeing one always makes me miss home.