By Suzanne Haugh, Staff Writer

MARIETTA—Felicia just celebrated her 10th birthday. “But 19 is my favorite number,” she confided over the phone one rainy evening. “It makes me think of 19 puppies.”

Earlier in the brief conversation she shared that one thing her 6-year-old sister didn’t like was thunder, which was why the baby of the family was having trouble falling asleep.

For their mother, Brenda, now 43, sleep had escaped her one January evening in 1998, as she lay in a Grady Hospital bed shocked by news that she was HIV positive. In the darkness of that night it took the Lord and love for her three daughters to pull her through to morning.

Not soon after that night she turned to the surrounding community for help in piecing together her life for the sake of her three daughters. One place she found help was where she least expected it, a Catholic church.

“Before I thought the Catholic Church was very private, more for the upper crust, and that they only helped people who were Catholic,” said Brenda, who attends a Cobb County AME church.

But Brenda has experienced the generosity of parishioners at St. Ann’s Church in Marietta through the St. Ann’s AIDS ministry. Whether it is giving out grocery vouchers for a daughter’s birthday cake or providing rides to places one may need to go, St. Ann’s AIDS ministry has orchestrated the effort to keep intact the lives of many people, like Brenda, who are HIV positive.

“People are warm and open,” Brenda said of the ministry’s volunteers. “They don’t ever make me feel like I have a disease.”

Brenda, who is African-American, had moved to Marietta, while going through a divorce, to be near a home where she provided child care and domestic help to a family.

“I was working, doing my regular everyday routine—go to work, come home, feed the kids. I started getting chest pains, which I thought might be gas. It bothered me a lot.”

The pain continued off and on until one Friday when she finally made arrangements for the girls to spend Saturday with their grandmother while she went into the emergency room.

“I got myself together and went to Grady,” she said. “The rest of the day they did all kinds of tests and they couldn’t diagnose anything. They couldn’t find why my chest was so bad.”

Brenda remembered times early on when she would get mouth sores, called thrush, sometimes associated with someone who is HIV positive.

“I didn’t know any symptoms of HIV; it never crossed my mind. I knew the disease was out there.”

She recalled going to a drug store one time and asking the pharmacist what he would recommend for her mouth sores and what caused them.

“He wouldn’t tell me,” she remembered, “and he said that I needed to see a doctor. I thought he was being rude, nasty. Goodness, I had never seen a pharmacist never tell someone what they wanted to know. I thought that was strange.”

So she remained in the hospital as they ran test after test until doctors decided to admit her, finally asking for her permission to administer an HIV/AIDS test. “Sure,” said Brenda, who later was moved into her own room.

“They still were not telling me anything,” she said. “It was so weird. It started to make me angry. Once the shift changed, I started questioning the nurse and she told me the doctor would be in to talk to me.”

The doctor came and asked her if she knew what HIV was and then told her that her test had come back positive.

“Oh no, you must have the wrong person,” Brenda responded. “I was really upset. They sent a priest in and he talked with me. But I was still thinking, ‘I can’t believe it’s me ... It couldn’t be me. When did this happen?’”

Brenda refused to take any calls from her concerned family, even from her 22-year-old daughter calling from Macon. Doctors prescribed something to calm her nerves and help her sleep as Brenda agonized over the news.

“I just wanted to die,” she remembered thinking. “I thought I would die and my girls would be left to raise themselves ... I felt that life was over.”

She knew there wasn’t a cure and her despair finally gave in to a desire for sleep.

“But the Lord woke me and let me know that it wasn’t that bad. I had three beautiful daughters. I decided to let it go ... The Lord let me know that he wouldn’t let something happen and that he was not ready for me. I had to get myself together to take care of my girls.”

The next morning Brenda answered a call from the woman for whom she worked. Brenda told her the news and the two prayed over the phone. She later talked to her ex-husband who then brought the girls to the hospital. Once Brenda let those close to her back into her life, she found needed support.

“Everybody was there for me,” she said. “I felt they loved me unconditionally, that they knew I was still Brenda.”

Brenda’s closest friend told her older daughter, who was hurt that her mother hadn’t confided in her but reinforced her feelings that “she didn’t care how I got it, but was concerned that I would die. ‘I need you to be here for me,’” she told her mother.

With medication and bed rest, Brenda regained her strength and left the hospital. Now she had to redirect her life and sought the help of others to do so.

“I was trying to figure out the way to go,” she said. Using a list of AIDS-related community groups given to her by a Cobb County social worker, she spent a day making phone calls to organizations fairly close to her home. She called St. Ann’s AIDS hotline and left her name and phone number, not expecting much from a ministry within the Catholic Church. Within a day, Sharon Collins, coordinator for the St. Ann’s AIDS ministry, returned her call.

“I told her that I was looking for beds for my little girls,” said Brenda, who was still reeling from her recent separation from her husband.

Collins then said that she would place an announcement in the church bulletin and gave Brenda the phone number of ministry member Jeannie Feichtner, who was in charge of handling the basic needs, such as food, of those they help. The next evening, Brenda received a phone call from Feichtner, whom she described as “a sweetheart.” The ministry wanted to let her grocery shop at the church pantry. When Brenda told her that she had no car, arrangements were made to bring the food to her.

“She and Sharon are most inspiring in my life,” Brenda said. “I forever thought that the large Catholic Church was too sophisticated and that it only helped Catholics,” she said. “I never knew how much they cared; I didn’t know.”

Feichtner would visit or call Brenda on and off to ask how she was feeling. Not long after her request, a full-sized mattress and frame found their way into Brenda’s modest apartment.

“They’ve done so many things and they’re always asking if there is anything else they can do,” she said.

As Brenda waited for her first Social Security check to come, St. Ann’s AIDS ministry helped to cover some of her rent and a light bill.

“They were just so great ... I could go on and on. Finally I got to where I didn’t need anything and another girl I met (who needed help), through me, got in touch with St. Ann’s and they helped her with furniture, clothes, food.”

While Brenda has told some friends and relatives about contracting HIV/AIDS, others close to her, mostly older family members out of state, still don’t know. “They’re illiterate about AIDS and do not have a lot of knowledge about it. One of my nephews has it and I can see how they treat him differently ... Once I’d tell them they would be saying, ‘I can’t believe it. Who did it?’”

Except for a cold she let go too long, Brenda has remained healthy since her hospital stay two years ago. She has gone from “the walking dead” to “the miracle patient,” dubbed so by her doctor with the Cobb County Health Department.

Brenda visits her doctor about every two months for a check-up and to replenish her medication. “There’s a lot to name them all,” she said. Her doctor writes down a schedule for her that she tries to follow. She wonders, however, if she might not be taking one of her pills correctly and searches out her schedule, something she meant to do earlier. She will go in next week for lab work that will test how well her body is responding.

Her current treatment includes taking 13 pills, about half in the morning and the remainder at night. Brenda started a new treatment in September since her T-cell count, used as an indication of the strength of one’s immune system, had dropped even though she felt fine. “My body plays tricks on me,” she said. She now takes fewer pills than when she first started treatment, but stronger doses.

She has made adjustments to her life to account for living with the HIV/AIDS virus. “My eating habits have changed a lot,” she said. “I can’t eat any raw foods at all, like sunny-side-up eggs, which I used to love.”

While her oldest daughter knows about her having HIV/AIDS, Brenda has chosen to wait to tell her youngest daughters, who continue to test negative for the virus at annual check-ups. “Felicia is real emotional. Her teachers are always talking about how loving she is. If she thought I was living with a disease that could kill me, it would really affect her. She would always be crying.”

Brenda has envisioned telling her daughters some day. “I would be able to tell Felicia if I knew I was definitely sick (and close to death) ... but I’d like to wait until she gets older and has learned more about it.”

She has felt a calling to educate others by sharing her story. “There’s so much information all over TV, but it’s not really talked about in schools or churches. I want to wake up people and let them know how they can get it. There’s still so much information, still people who don’t care.”

She commented on the population change of those she now sees as she sits in the clinic’s waiting room. “Half of the patients (the doctor) is getting are teens,” she said. “When I started to go in, there were no teens there.”

People need not be ashamed about having HIV/AIDS, Brenda said and added, “If it happens, it happens; you have to deal with it. But a lot of people aren’t open to it.”

If she didn’t have her two youngest daughters to raise, Brenda said she would have accepted an offer by one organization to tell her story before different groups. But the kids’ daily needs come first, such as her middle child’s adjustment in a new school program.

“She’s tried it and has done really well,” said the mother now wrapped up in her girls’ lives. Her youngest daughter she jokingly described as “the boy I never wanted.”

“She’s full of energy and loves all kinds of boy stuff ... She can be rough and most of her friends are boys.”

Both of her daughters enjoy working with computers, which they use at school. “When we go to the library the girls go crazy. I can never get them out of the library.”

Brenda’s current project is to find a way to replace the old broken computer handed down to them. “I know I ask for a lot,” she said, “but I think, you never know. It’s Christmastime and maybe someone will want a brand new one to update.”

This year the St. Ann’s AIDS ministry will sponsor Brenda and her family at Christmas. And if history does repeat itself, there will be “a lot of love from St. Ann’s.”