BOULDER — Barb Cardell wore “an ugly man’s watch” with eight alarm settings after she was diagnosed in 1993 with human immunodeficiency virus.
Now, though she swallows 60 pills a day to stay healthy, she needs no reminders. Cardell long ago memorized her medication schedule and all of its empty-stomach or full-stomach requirements.
But the stigma surrounding the infection she got from an HIV-infected boyfriend in 1991 still haunts her.
Though once an ambitious executive chef, she will never cook professionally again.
“People are afraid of eating that food, though that’s not how HIV spreads,” said Cardell, 46.
The Boulder County AIDS Project, which this year marks its 25th anniversary, faces the same challenge as it serves HIV-positive men, women and children living in Boulder, Broomfield, Clear Creek and Gilpin counties.
It offers free and confidential HIV testing, case management, medical care access, financial assistance, food bank resources, support groups and more.
Yet BCAP wants the Longmont branch, which this month relocated to 515 Kimbark St., to maintain a low profile.
“We have people who haven’t even told their sister, who they live with, because the stigma is so strong,” said Dan Hanley, BCAP’s development director. “Some of that stigma comes from homophobia. … But we’re in Longmont because there is a need.”
Cardell, a heterosexual woman who married in 1993 just before she was diagnosed, first volunteered at BCAP in 1994 after moving from Madison to Boulder. She remembers volunteers lighting a candle by the front desk in the Boulder home office whenever a client died.
Stigma caused some families to submit nothing more than the first initial of the late client’s name and the date of death to post by the flame.
“And this is at an AIDS organization,” Cardell said.
Volunteers from BCAP’s earliest years nevertheless appreciate progress between now and when the AIDS crisis first hit in the early 1980s.
For instance, burning the bed sheets crossed Neil Fishman’s mind after a buddy in California stricken with AIDS visited a mutual friend in Boulder.
“We didn’t know anything. We thought you might get it from toilet seats or door knobs. Scientists had not yet even isolated the virus then,” Fishman, 54, said.
HIV, the virus that causes the deadly AIDS, passes from an infected person to another person through blood, semen, vaginal fluids and breast milk.
Fishman, a Boulder scientist who served from 1987 to 1990 as BCAP’s third president, recalled how two volunteers launched what is now known as BCAP in 1985. They incorporated the nonprofit organization as the Boulder County Health Network to avoid using the AIDS acronym in the return address on mailings.
Though that euphemistic name eventually changed, BCAP managed to attract more clients and volunteers outside the gay community.
Bonnie Crumpacker, a wife and mother of four, volunteered in 1987 as Fishman’s vice president after she heard then-Colorado Rep. David Skaggs fielding complaints from gay men in Boulder. They reported housing and medical care discrimination related to their homosexual or bisexual orientation.
“(Supporting BCAP) was an act of bravery. A lot of people hate gay people,” the Boulder resident said. “But at some point, people began to realize it could be their child, certainly. … I knew young men whose parents just couldn’t adjust. I found that hard, and then they would come around for the funeral.”
Before the 1996 debut of protease inhibitors — powerful drug cocktails to slow the spread of HIV — AIDS (the infection’s end-stage immune system crash) ranked as the leading cause of death among those between ages 25 and 44 in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.
Crumpacker, 83, remembers the peculiarity of visiting so many sick young men — one of whom died in her presence — during her BCAP tenure.
Today, AIDS is the sixth highest cause of death for that age category.
The majority of new annual HIV cases in the U.S. still stem from men who have sex with men. But heterosexual contact accounts for 31 percent of annual new infections, according to the CDC.
That statistic and her personal experience pushed Cardell to serve beyond her volunteer roles over the years as BCAP’s bookkeeper, board member and client chauffeur.
“I went to BCAP and said, ‘You guys need a woman to tell your story.’ And they said, ‘Well, we had one, and she died. So it looks like it’s you,’” she said.
Now, Cardell speaks publicly on behalf of BCAP to prevent disease transmission, encourage early treatment and break stereotypes.
“(Adults) want to hear that you slept with a million people or used injection drugs. They want you to be so different that they don’t have to worry about it,” she said. “But kids say, ‘Now I know that you’re just like everyone else. You just have to try harder to live.’”