Stricken with AIDS after a sexual assault, she has made awareness and education her mission. Cathy Robinson was expecting her second child in 1991 when a routine blood test turned joy to horror: She was HIV-positive. Stunned, she realized she had caught the virus when she had been raped seven years earlier. "How do you keep from shaking your fist at God?" says Robinson, 37, a former teacher living in Lakeland, Fla. After her son Garrett, now 11, was born, she wrote letters to him and daughter Lyndsy, now 12--messages for milestones she thought she would never see. "Their first day of school, Lyndsy's first period, their weddings," says Robinson, who came down with full-blown AIDS in 1996. (The children are HIV-negative.) "Well, Lyndsy got her period last year and I was there."
What
helps sustain her--aside from anti-AIDS drugs--is activism. In 1992 Robinson
began speaking out about the disease; she now drives 70,000 miles a year
throughout the Southeast to schools, conferences and churches. She also
co-founded the non-profit Friends- Together, which provides weekend camps for
families coping with HIV: "She doesn't ask for pity," says Will Gregory, a
professor at Florida Southern College. "My students fall in love with her."
Robinson faced another health crisis in late 1999. Diagnosed with breast cancer, she was given 18 months to live. "That was three years ago," she says. Divorced from her first husband, she wed Friends-Together director Steve Pickett, 48, this month. "1 should be dead," says Robinson. "But not only am I alive, I'm actually living."
Author : Steve Helling
Photograph by Ben Van Hook
To Read the article in it's entirety , see the May 19th issue of People
Magazine.
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