One run we went on (and this happens quite a bit) was to check on a two-year old with pneumonia. We went in there, and this cute little guy was laying on the floor, and he wasn’t breathing. We did everything. We even did mouth to mouth before we got the oxygen on him. We didn’t take the time to put gloves and masks on and all of that because he was just a two year old little baby and he needed help right away. Anyway, the relatives kept saying, “He’s got pneumonia.” But he died, and there was nothing we could do. 

So we packaged him up and we were taking him out to the ambulance. As we were on our way out one of the relatives came up to us and said, “By the way, the boy has AIDS.” And here we were working on him without gloves on, and doing mouth-to-mouth, so that worried us quite a bit. People don’t always tell us the whole story when there is a potential problem that could make the firefighters sick.