Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371 (Graphic - download pdf or read online

In 1994, on the top of the AIDS epidemic within the usa, MK Czerwiec took her first nursing task, at Illinois Masonic scientific middle in Chicago, as a part of the caregiving employees of HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371. Taking Turns pulls again the curtain on existence within the ward.

A shining instance of excellence within the remedy and care of sufferers, Unit 371 was once a neighborhood for millions of sufferers and households stricken by HIV and AIDS and the folk who cared for them. This picture novel combines Czerwiec’s stories with the oral histories of sufferers, relations, and employees. It depicts existence and demise within the ward, the methods the unit affected and expert those that gone through it, and the way many glance again on their time there this present day. Czerwiec joined Unit 371 at a pivotal time within the background of AIDS: deaths from the syndrome within the Midwest peaked in 1995 after which dropped significantly within the following years, with the discharge of antiretroviral protease inhibitors. This optimistic flip of occasions ended in a decline in sufferer populations and, eventually, to the closure of Unit 371. Czerwiec’s confined, inviting drawing kind and thoroughly thought of narrative learn person, institutional, and neighborhood responses to the AIDS epidemic—as good because the function that paintings can play within the grieving process.

Deeply own but made of many voices, this historical past of everyday life in a different AIDS care unit is an open, sincere examine anguish, grief, and desire between a neighborhood of doctors and sufferers on the middle of the epidemic.