Sandy, 12, Dreams of Heaven as She Bravely Battles the AIDS Infection : Epidemic: Disease has devoured every part of her body. She is among nearly 2,500 children under 13 who have contracted full-blown AIDS, with more than half dying.

Sometimes, when the pain in her belly and her toothpick-thin legs tears at her, Lissette Rodriguez thinks of heaven.

“When mom dies, I die, everyone dies, I can walk in there,” she says in her frail voice. “No pain in my stomach, no pain in my knee, and I walk again.”

Sometimes, her chest feels so tight she cannot breathe. Sometimes, those who love her cannot hold her because her 40-pound body is so brittle that she bleeds inside.

In these excruciating moments, Sandy, as she is nicknamed, prays. She asks God to take the pain away.

Barely 12 years old, Sandy is dying of AIDS. For her, death is represented by the concept of heaven, where everything is beautiful.

“You close your eyes and your body is not working,” she says. “Then you go to God, go to Jesus in a big place where he lives. My father is in there. Everyone who dies goes there.”

Sandy’s doctor, Dr. Laura Hoyt, said every part of the girl’s body, from her head to her toes, is not working properly: her brain, lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, blood, immune system.

“We’ve had her on hospice care at home since last spring,” the doctor said. “We are keeping her as comfortable as possible for as long as possible. She hates being in the hospital and doesn’t want to die in the hospital.”

Sandy is among the nearly 2,500 children under 13 who have contracted full-blown AIDS since the epidemic began. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta reported in August that more than 1,300 of those children have died in the United States and its territories.

Sandy was born four weeks premature in New York City. The woman she knows as her mother, Carmen Candelaria, is really her aunt. Candelaria took Sandy and another child from her own sister when they were born because the sister was unable to care for them.

Sandy contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion needed because of her early birth, Candelaria said. The girl’s natural mother died two years ago, at age 41, after mixing Valium and alcohol at a party, she said.

Candelaria said she knows nothing about Sandy’s natural father. Her own husband, the man Sandy knew as her father, was killed when Sandy was 7 in a holdup in the video store he owned in Puerto Rico, where they lived for five years.

“I miss my father,” Sandy says. “I miss him every day, every night.”

Sandy hasn’t walked since last December. She spent from Christmas through March in the hospital, and watched her friend Christina from Puerto Rico die of AIDS on New Year’s Eve.

“I was scared,” she says. “Soon, her eyes were closed. Her mother is crying. Her father is crying. I started crying. I said, ‘I want to see her.’ She was covered. Her hair was a mess, all gone. I miss her. She’s gone to heaven. She moved from the islands to God.”

Candelaria threw a big barbecue May 1 for Sandy’s 12th birthday and invited the people at the hospital who care for her.

Sandy, who weighed 60 pounds then, mustered the strength to blow out the candles and got icing on her nose.

She celebrated her first Communion not in a church, but in the hospital, where she returned at the end of May when her condition worsened.

For Candelaria, it was bittersweet. She is tormented by the picture in her mind. She is unable to shake the image of a little girl with brown hair and eyes, white lace dress and stockings, locket around her tiny neck, in a wheelchair surrounded by nurses, a cake decorated with the sentiments, “Jesus Loves Lissette. We Do, Too.”

“I just got sad,” Candelaria said. “I wanted it to be not in the hospital, but a real normal Communion. She told me not to cry, if I cry, she’ll cry.” They both cried.

Sandy is attached to Candelaria, wanting her there every moment, even sleeping with her. Candelaria is Sandy’s shadow and has devoted much of her life to caring for her.

She is Candelaria’s protector, never talking to her about the inevitable.

“She knows,” Candelaria said. “She never talks to me about dying. She sees me cry too many times.”

Each day brings a new onslaught of pain for Sandy: diarrhea, coughing, fever, fungus, itching. Her black-and-blue body is replenished with new blood every month, transfusions to keep her alive and platelets to help stem the disease’s tide.

A hug, a kiss, a banged foot can start internal bleeding.

“I have a pain in here,” Sandy says, rubbing her stomach. “Sometimes I throw it up. Sometimes I get mad at Doreen.”

Doreen Small, her devoted nurse, said Sandy always fights with her:

“Then she says she’s sorry. I’m the focus of her anger, which is OK. When she’s in a good mood, she’ll paint pictures for me. I have a bunch of pictures.”

A luxury for Sandy is to have her feet rubbed. She asks anyone who is handy to accommodate her. When her cousin Lues Rivera jokingly threatened to stop one day, she teased him in Spanish, “I dare you.”

Sandy is a prisoner of her bed, cared for at home by her mother and the Center For Hope Hospice.

“Don’t put me in there yet,” she orders Small, afraid she may never get back out to do all the things she wants.

Her bedroom is filled with a cabinet of survival gear: sterile water, saline solution, gauze, diapers, dressing kits, needles to flush her IV.

Her link to life is a catheter that enters her chest, nourishing her with food, vitamins, minerals and dextrose. The thrush infection from her mouth to her stomach and the medicine have killed her appetite.

“Sometimes the food at the hospital I don’t like it,” she says. A treat for her is pizza and french fries, but she can handle only a few bites.

Her constant companions are her friend, Poopy, who takes her shopping, a doll called Baby Bubbles, whom she hugs and rocks, and the telephone. She frequently calls Poopy to take her shopping and to chitchat. “I want to see my grandmother and cousin. You see the movie ‘Mermaid?’ I like the sound.”

“When you think how limited her life is, that’s her only contact to the outside world,” said Small.

Her dreams are simple: to get out of her bed, to go to school, to see her classmates and the New Kids on the Block, to have another party, to fly to Puerto Rico to visit her grandmother, to see the clouds from the plane.

“I don’t want to die, never, never,” she cries. “I want to live.”