Kristen Davis

speaker

1,669 appearances 27 recordings 6 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 13 Apr

Kristen Davis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 3.

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My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark · 457 - In With The Goths · 5 Dec 2024 podcast

He knows that'll be the key to improving this poor quality of care that everyone is seeing everywhere else. Right. But Cliff insists on being honest about the risks of this work. He has worked with enough AIDS patients without contracting the illness himself to know that that's possible. But generally, information is sparse, and he needs his staff to be informed and accepting of the unknowns.

One 5B staffer later recalls an early conversation with Cliff where he says, quote, go home and talk to your significant others because we don't know. We can't tell you that you're not going to get this disease.

Yeah. How brave. And then Cliff talks to the patients themselves to find out what they want out of this ward. He'll later say, quote, the first thing I heard was I want to feel like I'm being treated like a person.

There's a tear in that eye right there.

Well, it's just, look, I lost a friend to AIDS who was 21 years old. Oh, my God. And it was a big surprise. And it was, he was my friend from sixth grade. Wow. And I loved him very much, Ken Mason. And to see him, he... Thank God had a very loving, very accepting family who took care of him right till the end. And so I got to go see him basically in his at his mom's house.

And it was one of the worst things I've ever experienced to kind of see that he was ravaged. I mean, he was just like. He was emaciated. And it's so easy to think about all of these men who in the 70s were like, oh, you know, everyone's encouraged to come out and we need to fight for our rights. And we need to like be the people who we are.

And then suddenly this happens and it enables these bigots to talk about racism. gay people, gay men, like you got what you deserved.

It's so disgusting. It's just like, yeah, everything about it is so horrifying. And then the leadership that intentionally didn't help.

Or a decent human being.

Like somebody that would look at that and say, it's insane, but here's what's beautiful. Basically, that's where Cliff comes in. He goes, we'll do it ourselves and we'll do it for each other. And there's a lot of lesbian women and a lot of female nurses who went in. We're like, we will take care of them.

We'll do this and we'll take these risks because this is we cannot just let these men die to protect ourselves. That is not the point of being a nurse or a doctor. And they weren't the only ones who felt that way. Thank God. And because of that. Then essentially after being able to give that care, they proved that you can give that care. Right.

And basically they went out there and they were the first line, first responders to go, look, we did it and we didn't catch it. Therefore, you need to do it. Yeah. The idea that they had to do that, though. Right.

And the in-between of all the people that died alone and isolated and it's just, it's disgusting and horrible. So... When Cliff asked those patients what they wanted out of the ward, he said, quote, Yeah. Basics. The very, the lowest bar. Yeah. So the virus that causes AIDS, HIV, is finally identified in May of 1983. And two months later, in July of 1983, Ward 5B officially opens to the public.

It's helmed by head nurse Allison Moed, who oversees a team of 11 dedicated nurses. Some of these nurses are straight, some are gay. All of them have agreed to put aside their personal fears surrounding AIDS to offer compassionate care to their sick and vulnerable patients. Allison later says, quote, I was enthralled by this idea of love for your fellow being.

This was a confluence of nurses, of people who wanted to take care of this population that had been stigmatized, discriminated against, not cared for during a period of their lives where their lives were ending. Professionally, how do we care for them? Caring is what we were about. Wow. Imagine that. So 5B is unlike anywhere else at the time.

Here, the doctors and nurses don't speak down to their patients, and they certainly don't judge them. In fact, patients are treated as a member of their own care team, and they're involved in all the conversations about their treatment. 5B is one of the only units in the U.S. where people can visit outside of set visiting hours. Oh, wow.

And those visitors don't have to be literal family members in the biological sense. They can be members of the patient's chosen family. The staff even sneaks in their patient's pets when they can. Also on 5B, staffers don't use the same full body PPE many other facilities across the country do. Instead, they wear protective equipment when necessary.

The 5B staff use common sense precautions that keep the patient's dignity in mind, remembering the value of human touch and connection. Cliff says, quote, we knew by now that AIDS was not transmitted casually. I had no qualms about climbing onto the bed with my patients to hold them. That had never been done before.

As a nurse, you might touch someone's hand, but you would never take them in your arms. Oh, my God. The image. Yeah. This is a huge deal. For a sense of timeline, this is five years before that famous moment where Princess Diana made history publicly shaking the hand of someone with HIV. Right. Five years before that. Yeah.

So it was at a time where touching a person who had AIDS, let alone holding them to provide comfort, is seen as extremely risky by almost everyone. There's also a large outside component to Ward 5B, which includes a roster of volunteers from the gay community, local hospices, and the Shanty Project, who do things like decorate and furnish the ward. Wow. That's so hacky.

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