Pair Take Pride in Nursing AIDS Patients : Health: They have been colleagues for seven years, spouses for five--taking on the job it seemed no one else wanted.

In 1984, Ellen Altmann’s boss at LaGuardia Hospital told her she was spending too much time assisting a man who had AIDS. The physicians were angry with her and worried she was going to catch the disease by being in the same room with him so often.

So she did the only thing she felt she could do.

“When I handed in my resignation,” Ellen said, “I told them, ‘I’ve decided to work exclusively with patients with AIDS.’ ”

Her supervisor was astounded. “What, are you crazy? Aren’t you afraid? You want to have a family someday. You’re going to catch something!”

“I’m not afraid,” Ellen said. “I’m just not ignorant.”

Since the time before AIDS had a name, Ellen and Ed Altmann have built their professional--and sometimes, personal--lives around caring for people with the fatal, incurable disease. They are both nurses, colleagues for seven years, spouses for five, taking on the job it seemed at times no one else wanted.

“AIDS is especially nursing’s disease,” said Ellen, 32, now the head nurse for the new AIDS unit at Lenox Hill Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “I could work in a doctor’s office, I could work in a lab, I could work in surgery, I could work in maternal-child health, where a lot of things are mostly happy.

“But I think this is really the essence of nursing.”

If AIDS is nursing’s disease, as the Altmanns believe, it is because medical technology has made so little headway against it. Nursing care can make a difference, can help keep a person with the full-blown disease out of the hospital.

But few drugs have any impact on the inexorable ravages of the virus.

“I think this is a particularly insane profession, very strenuous, where you’re always facing insurmountable odds,” said Ed, 36, who works in the nursing end of AIDS research running drug trials for the Community Research Initiative.

“Working in a field like this, keeping that separation between personal and professional, keeping some control over your life, it really is a skill. A lot of people do burn out . . . but to stay in it, you really have to develop those boundaries for yourself.”

There have been many times in their lives when the boundaries between their personal and professional lives have disappeared, lost in their passion for their cause.

After Ellen resigned, she and Ed went to St. Clare’s, a small, aging Roman Catholic hospital tucked into Manhattan’s tough Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.

There, in the city’s first dedicated AIDS unit, they worked 14-hour days creating what would become a model for other hospitals.

The two of them were the entire nursing staff, a pair with distinctly different but complementary styles. She is intense, matter-of-fact, a doer who exudes confidence and competence; he is more easygoing, a low-key observer who seems quietly self-assured.

They also were newlyweds, spending 24 hours a day together, supporting each other, fighting the tough fight and loving it.

“We spent more time together working than we ever have,” Ellen said. “We were fighting for a cause together, something we were both committed to.”

“It was a tremendous task and a thankless job,” Ed said. “But by doing it, by putting ourselves in that situation, we got the opportunity to learn how the system really works, how to start a new program and make it fit into a hospital that’s very resistant to change.”

At first, the doctors wouldn’t come to their floor, the housekeepers wouldn’t come, the X-ray technicians wouldn’t come. The kitchen served patients’ meals on paper trays. The fear was palpable.

Gradually, that changed. As the years passed, staffers who had resented mandatory AIDS education classes that Ellen taught began asking for them. What never changed was the relative youth of the patients, many of them vital people at the height of their careers, and the inevitability of their deterioration. “We both ended up getting involved with special patients who, for one reason or another, became very close to us,” Ellen said. “We were able to support each other through their deaths.”

As patients have become their friends over the years, so some of their friends have become patients.

For months, the Altmanns took turns nursing a friend who required daily care. They were the only ones he would allow to administer his twice-daily intravenous medication.

Either Ed or Ellen would visit him in the morning before work, and the other would come in the evening. They kept their home stocked with IV supplies in case he was visiting their Queens neighborhood.

“We never made any plans that didn’t include seeing him or communicating with him in some way,” Ellen said. “We restricted our lives based on how he was feeling, because we always wanted to be available.

“It was really stressful, and there were times we were angry. We shouldn’t have gotten so involved--but how could we not?” she said, adding that their care helped the friend avoid two or three hospitalizations. He died in January.

“I don’t regret any of it,” Ellen said. “Even though at times it seemed overwhelming for him to be so dependent on us, and us to have all our social plans revolved around his care, I would not have done it any differently.”

Still, the days are gone when they would unhesitatingly dedicate every spare minute to AIDS care with little thought to their personal lives. Now, Ed spends two days a week at home with their 20-month-old son, Joshua, and Ellen makes it a point to work regular hours and spend evenings and weekends with her family.

But the nature of their work--the intensity of the demands, the inevitability of death--means they always will need to look to each other for special support.

“When you’re talking to a friend who is not a nurse, and they ask, ‘What do you do?’ I can’t possibly answer that,” Ellen said. “I can talk to you for weeks and weeks and weeks, and you still wouldn’t understand all the things I do as a nurse. And Ed understands.”

“Sometimes,” Ed said, “just a couple of words, and I know exactly what she’s going through.”