Woman Fights War on Apathy

By Robin Williams Adams

ARCADIA — In brightly colored slacks and shirt, her dark hair tousled, Cathy Robinson looks like any slightly harried mother of two active preschoolers.

She displays their pictures proudly during an interview.

But she grows agitated when she thinks as far ahead as their elementary school years, let alone their graduation from high school or college.

Robinson, who has AIDS, doesn’t expect to experience those milestones with 3½-year-old Lyndsy or 2 ½-year-old Garrett.

Neither does her husband, also diagnosed with AIDS.

“The chances either my husband or I will be alive when our children go to elementary school is basically zero,” the 28-year-old said.

Most women living with AIDS remain silent. Not Robinson.

The Florida native feels compelled to reach as many people as possible with one simple message: AIDS could happen to you, just as it did to me.

“I never want my kids to be ashamed of who their mom and dad are,” Robinson told hospital workers during an AIDS program in Arcadia.

“I want them to be able to look at you and say ‘My mom and dad died of AIDS, but before they died, they made a difference.’”

Three years after learning she is infected, Cathy Robinson feels her time to make a difference is running out.

Although she hasn’t been sick, the human immunodeficiency virus that leads to AIDS has demolished her infection-fighting white blood cells. Her husband, Dan, almost died twice from AIDS-related illnesses.

Their children test negative, she said.

She and her husband didn’t shoot drugs. They were heterosexual, faithful to each other, never received transfusions. For all those reasons, Robinson said, they didn’t think much about AIDS.

While she was pregnant with Garrett, the couple decided to get more life insurance. Their blood tests came back positive for AIDS, she said.

Into the shock and disbelief surfaced a memory she wanted to forget.

At age 18, working in a convenience store, she had been robbed and raped.

Since being diagnosed, Robinson said, she and her husband learned that one of the men who raped her died in jail of AIDS.

At the Jacksonville hospital where she gave birth, Robinson told employees she had AIDS. Three nurses refused to help with the delivery. Someone called the state, suggesting their children be taken away, she said.

Robinson went from stunned disbelief to blazing anger.

“It was the fear and anger I had over being judged that way that made me decide to go public,” Robinson said.

A few weeks after she began speaking publicly about AIDS in the Jacksonville area, her husband’s insurance job was eliminated, she said.

The couple moved in with her parents in Clewiston, beside Lake Okeechobee, where they stayed until a friend offered a house in nearby Moore Haven.

Robinson now travels around Florida to talk about AIDS. Pushing education and tolerance, she warns against unprotected sex, drug use and the childhood practice of sharing blood to become “blood brothers.”

“It’s the fear that causes this disease to spread,” Robinson said. “People don’t change their behavior because of fear.”

Many in Moore Haven and Clewiston have been supportive.

Robinson, whose father is a Methodist minister, is grateful for financial help from a church there. She praises volunteers who repaired their donated house. Although small and without air conditioning, it has given the family its own home again.

But not everyone has been accepting. Signs saying “No AIDS patients allowed” were nailed to their house. A dead cat was hung in their yard.

Asked what hurt most, Robinson recalled a minister’s comments while reading a prayer list.

“He told his congregation he couldn’t ask them to pray for our health,” she said. “All he could hope is we died quick.”