Counselor Understands Agony of AIDS Affliction : Helper and Victim, Support Unit Co-Founder Believed Disease ‘Wasn’t Going to Touch Me’

She has lived a fast life, around lots of gay men. At one lavish party at her hilltop house off Mulholland Drive in 1982, Nancy Sawaya became a co-founder of AIDS Project Los Angeles. There were no festivities last April, however, when she became one of its clients.

The effects of AIDS now sometimes leave Sawaya without strength enough to lift her adopted 2-year-old daughter.

“I never thought it would happen to me,” she said last week, “I just didn’t. Don’t ask me how I could have had my head buried that deep in the sand, but I didn’t think it would happen.”

Sawaya, a buoyant, blue-eyed 40-year-old, is heterosexual, but has many close friends who are not. For seven years before she married, she had a lover who later died with AIDS. And she talks of being “sexually active” with other men through whom she might have been exposed.

“For me, I always thought because I was such a good, giving, loving person that I was exempt from this. It wasn’t going to touch me,” she said. “Do I regret what I did? No, I don’t . . . If I were to leave today, I’ve had an incredibly full and loving life.

“However, with what I know today would I repeat that?” As if the answer wasn’t self-evident, she softly continued, “No.”

When doctors told Sawaya that she had AIDS, volunteer coordinator Dan Morin said he felt “very saddened and distressed.” But not surprised. “I’ve been here so long nothing seems to surprise me.”

People are dying from the disease every day, he said. More and more of them women, who account for about 7% of the reported cases in this country.

Sawaya has counseled “an awful lot” of them, Morin said, causing colleagues to marvel at her dedication. “I think many ordinary souls would have shied away from the situation a long time ago, yet she keeps coming back,” he said.

A Christmas party at Sawaya’s house in 1982 was the birthplace of AIDS Project Los Angeles, the oldest and largest organization in Southern California providing education and support services for those with AIDS. She and half a dozen friends used the occasion to raise about $8,000, enough to rent a small office on Hollywood’s Cole Avenue.

They began counseling about 20 people known to have acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Today, the project serves about 750. Clients are fed, housed, advised and consoled, thanks to an annual budget of $3.2 million raised from government grants and private donations. A staff of 50 professionals is supplemented by a force of 700 volunteers.

“What Nancy brought more than anything to the project was unconditional love,” said co-founder Max Drew, who also has AIDS. “She was never afraid of clients, however sick they were. If they needed someone to clean their house or if they needed someone to bathe them, she was always available.”

Drew said he does see “a bit of irony” in the fact that both he and Sawaya have AIDS, considering that they have worked so hard to help its victims. But Drew said he doesn’t believe it sends a mixed message.

“I could have been exposed to it five or 10 years ago. As it happens, we very much followed our own advice from right away. Everybody put on the brakes,” he said, and began to modify their sexual habits to lessen the risk of exposure.

In those early days, Sawaya single-handedly ran the project’s client services operation, where the work week commonly stretched to 60 hours. After tries at acting, modeling and teaching school, she found that she was “not a very career oriented person . . . but I enjoyed working with people.”

The pace was typical of her nearly 20-year involvement in one social service effort after another, from talking with delinquent teen-agers to listening over a hot line at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center.

“I’m not quite sure how a non-gay person counsels little 16-year-old girls,” Sawaya said with a smile, “but counseling people is basically always the same.”

What differs in dealing with AIDS patients, however, is the impact it can have on counselors.

“The debilitation of AIDS is really overwhelming,” she said. “The first time I was asked to go visit someone, whew, I can remember knocking on that door and going in and not really knowing what to expect. And the man who I went to see passed over just the next day. So that was pretty overwhelming. . . . “

But the “rewards” can be just as lasting.

“I had a guy in particular who really disliked me,” she recalled. “He just always thought I was a pretentious snob because I sort of was a pretentious snob, I guess. But I called him and I said, ‘You feel like company?’ and he said ‘Oh, all right.’ Well, he and I became so close over the last months of his life. And had it not been for that tragedy, I never would have known the joy that he and I gave one another.

“So when someone says, ‘Has AIDS done anything positive for you?’ It has just made me a whole person. It’s made me appreciate every moment of life.”

How much of life remains for Sawaya, no one knows. Most people live less than a year after being diagnosed. Since she found out she carried the disease, she has been hospitalized six times.

She knew more than a year ago that she carried the AIDS virus. Because she and husband Lou, a real estate businessman, wanted to have a child, she took a precautionary HTLV-III blood test, which turned out positive. They decided to adopt, even though her chances of actually contracting AIDS ran a relatively conservative 5% to 20%.

“I was numb” from the news, Sawaya recalled. “But I again thought because I was . . . such a giver and such a do-gooder that, you know, ‘Oh it’s not going to happen to me.’ ”

A child named Morgan became part of the family. And her husband was confident that he had an equally small chance of exposure because throughout their two-year marriage they had practiced “safe sex” in such a way that they exchanged no bodily fluids.

But last February, she injured a leg while working out at a local gym and the required surgery seemed to sap her strength. Then in April, she had difficulty catching her breath after climbing a flight of stairs one day. Doctors determined that she had a telltale form of pneumonia that, while harmless to most people, signalled the presence of AIDS and is frequently deadly.

A Reason for Fear

In the weeks that followed, she had a seizure, then a series of high fevers, at times reaching 106 degrees. Three weeks ago, it looked as if she might die.

What Sawaya feared the most, she said, was telling her father that she had been infected. When she did, he flew in from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., told her he loved her “and gave me a big kiss right smack on my mouth.”

Experimental drugs have since brought her illness under control. Sawaya was allowed to return home about 10 days ago with an uncomfortable catheter still tapped into her chest. During an interview, she grumbled about wishing that “the FDA (Food and Drug Aministration) would get off their butts” and make it easier for AIDS patients to take part in the testing of new drugs.

She is trying, essentially, to will herself well, to think positively, eat right and trust the Science of Mind philosophy she has long followed, which believes that God’s universe offers powerful energy to those able to tap into it. She meditates three times a day, near a bedroom balcony that affords a grand view of Franklin Canyon and the city below.

Contradictory Image

“I just wish people would realize that it could happen to anybody,” Sawaya said. “I do this couple support group on Monday nights, and all these people are a group of well-educated, down-to-earth, loving, successful people. It’s not the image like when you see on TV--they immediately shoot to Santa Monica Boulevard, somebody in leather, groping the other person and it’s not like that.

“Sure, there are those people who do have AIDS. But there also are a large, large amount of just everyday people. And the most important thing is to realize that shunning and abandonment and rejection is a horrible thing to do to someone.”

Sawaya also has committed herself to soaking up as much of life as she can, capturing even little things that once seemed inconsequential.

Still, she moves in and out of depression almost every day.

“I mean, let’s face it,” Sawaya said, “we had a lovely life. You can see we live in a beautiful home, we entertained constantly, we always were invited places, and now I don’t have the strength sometimes to do those things.”

But as a smile began to curl across her face, she added, “Except we went to a party on Saturday, and I danced. Two days out of the hospital and I danced.”