‘We couldn’t cure, but we could care’
‘5B’ revisits ward nurses built for patients nobody would touch
There are numerous simple, yet extraordinarily moving, scenes in Oakland filmmaker Dan Krauss’ new documentary “5B.” The powerful film, which will have its world premiere at the Castro Theatre on Sunday, Nov. 4, tells the story of the nurses at San Francisco General Hospital who opened the world’s first inpatient AIDS ward — in unit 5B on the fifth floor — in 1983 to care for those suffering, and dying in alarming numbers, during the epidemic’s initial skyrocketing rise.
In one brief sequence, using footage Krauss discovered in the CBS archives from a “60 Minutes” segment on the groundbreaking 5B caregivers, a skeletal, gravely ill patient named Tom, whose wife left him after his AIDS diagnosis, confesses: “I haven’t had any human contact in a year. That really puts you out of the picture. You forget love. And when somebody does touch you, it’s — wow.”
The camera zooms in on a
close-up of Tom’s hands being held and gently caressed by nurse Alice Downing. She says she feels “the pain of people AIDS turns into pariahs.”
The image of a patient and caregiver’s hands entwined is a potent visual reminder of a theme at the heart of “5B”: that in the early, disorienting days of the AIDS crisis — when HIV was still little understood (“People were whispering about this ‘gay cancer,’ ” nurse David Denmark says), the predominantly gay patients turning up with mysterious, lethal symptoms faced enormous stigmatization. Moments of humane, one-on-one warmth and touch were practically unheard of — and their palliative power was profound.
“The stigma against the community that was suffering was acute, and we were committed to not letting that stigma into our unit. Period,” said Alison Moed, 72, the nurse manager on 5B from its inception in 1983 until 1990.
Moed is interviewed in the film, and on a recent morning she joined Krauss at San Francisco General to revisit 5B (and 5A, where the ward moved in 1986 in need of more bed space) to discuss the important new film and the heartbreaking period of loss it documents.
As “5B” (co-directed by Paul Haggis) recounts, in 1981, doctors at San Francisco General started seeing the city’s first patients exhibiting what would become known as AIDS symptoms (Kaposi’s sarcoma, Pneumocystis pneumonia, opportunistic infections). By 1983, life expectancy for those newly diagnosed was just 18 months.
“We were shriveling up and dying, catching diseases nobody had ever heard of,” AIDS activist Harry Breaux says in “5B.”
Even within the hospital, the stigma and fear of the disease’s transmission led to substandard patient care. Breakfast trays piled up because auxiliary staff didn’t want to enter patients’ rooms. Bed linens went unchanged. Doctors wore HazMat “space suits” to examine patients and perform surgeries.
In response, nurse Cliff Morrison led the initiative in 1983 to open a special unit dedicated to holistically treating AIDS patients.
The nurses themselves physically erected the ward, which had been residents’ sleeping quarters. Nurses volunteered for duty, and they insisted on the importance of touch. No gloves. And no need to mask one’s own feelings.
“The overwhelming emotion among those of us who volunteered was, we just want to serve these people who aren’t being cared for. They are our brothers and sisters, our brethren,” Moed said.
Krauss received Oscar nominations for his 2004 film “The Death of Kevin Carter” and his 2o16 short “Extremis,” set in the ICU of Oakland’s Highland Hospital. Although he’s made two films set among end-of-life medical providers, Krauss said he doesn’t “have a fascination with death or suffering,” but rather an abiding interest “in questions of morality and ethics.” (He’s just finished production on his first narrative feature film, “The Kill Team,” about a whistle-blower soldier in Afghanistan.)
“To me, it seemed the nurses of 5B faced an existential dilemma,” Krauss said. “They were so compassionate and mission-driven, it may not have been a dilemma in their minds, but from an outsider’s perspective, think what it must have felt like to enter a ward filled with patients who were dying from an incredibly infectious disease, the source of which is unknown and the consequence of which is death. The question that drew me to the story was: If you thought you might die providing care for someone who was certain to die, is that a worthwhile risk?”
Moed paused at the entrance to 5B where a commemorative plaque was installed on the ward’s 20th
anniversary:
“Here on Ward 5B, a group of caregivers gathered to confront a new epidemic: AIDS. They created a haven of acceptance and compassion at a time when others called for isolation and rejection. They saw fellow human beings where others saw only contagion and disease.”
She remembered writing the statement of purpose with her fellow nurses, and also their initial sense of helplessness when the disease started to ravage the city’s gay population. (In the first 15 years of the AIDS crisis, 20,000 people died in San Francisco alone.)
In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Moed flips through the pages of a ledger her nursing staff kept in the ’80s listing all the AIDS deaths on the ward. The first page, from 1983, has 28 names; two years later, each page is crowded with hundreds of names.
“Before we understood the trajectory of the disease, we’d try to cure someone’s pneumonia or an acute exacerbation of an infection, but then something else even more horrible would happen after that,” she said. “We realized it was running away from us and we couldn’t control it.
“So what could we do? We could put our arms around someone. Hold their hands. Look into their eyes and tell them, ‘I’m here. What do you need?’ We couldn’t cure, but we could care.”
Krauss said he “found the center of the film” in the discovery of “this notion that human contact itself can be an act of radical activism.”
“It feels like there’s an eerie resonance with what’s happening in the world today. Here we are in 2018, decades after the AIDS crisis, and still confronting intolerance, bigotry and lack of compassion.” Krauss hopes “5B” “reminds people that what the nurses did, acting with compassion, tolerance and courage, is what makes us distinctly human. I think it’s a good time to be reminded of that.”