AIDS Victims Find Strength in Magic Johnson : HIV: But there’s a little bit of envy too. ‘Why are they looking for a miracle to save one person?’ one patient asked. ‘There’s thousands of us. We’re all looking for a miracle too.’

Mike was driving home to Mississippi with two things in mind: to watch one of his two sons play football and to break the heaviest of news to his parents. He had just tested positive for the AIDS virus.

Halfway between Atlanta and his hometown, his courage failed. To buy time, he pulled into a motel. Numbly turning on the television, he found a new strength instead.

It happened to be the night Earvin (Magic) Johnson announced that he, too, had tested positive for HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus. “All through the night I’m turning channels on the TV. It’s nothing but Magic,” said Mike, who spoke on condition that his full name not be used.

“I thank Magic Johnson a lot for coming out and revealing himself,” he said. “He really let me open myself up, especially to my family.”

After his son’s game, Mike broke the news to his father. “He said, ‘Son, my prayers are with you. And I still love you.’ ”

He did not ask how Mike contracted the virus. He may have thought, “because Magic Johnson got it through heterosexual sex, maybe my son did too,” Mike said.

A 35-year-old bisexual, Mike said he contracted the virus through sex without a condom. He would like to join Johnson in preaching safe sex to young people, but believes he can’t afford to. He is afraid he would be fired from his fast-food management job if anyone knew.

With such public attitudes unchanged, Johnson’s hero status gives Mike mixed feelings.

“Why are they looking for a miracle to save one person?” he said. “There’s thousands of us. We’re all looking for a miracle too.”

Now Mike is accelerating plans to return to Mississippi and open a nightclub. “It might be five years before I pass. I want to leave it to my sons. I want them to say, ‘My daddy, like Magic Johnson, he was a great man.’ ”

When Magic Johnson made a very public disclosure about AIDS, James made a very private decision: He wouldn’t run from the truth anymore.

“I thought, ‘I’ve got the same thing. I’ve got to face reality.’ ”

“I’ve said to myself, ‘I’m going to die.’ It’s not where I’m going to die in 50 or 60 years. I’m going to die pretty young,” said the 32-year-old Chicago man. “Knowing you’ve tested positive, it’s like sitting on Death Row waiting for your turn, and you know your turn is going to come.”

When James, a homosexual, first learned he had the virus, he kept it to himself.

“I couldn’t even bring myself to tell my mother,” he said. “I was embarrassed. It was like I disappointed her. . . . I told my grandmother. She started crying. She said, ‘We love you. It doesn’t make a difference what you do with your life; you’ve always been my little boy.’ ”

After his grandmother relayed the news, his mother assured him that she would do anything--even sell the house they share--so he would receive proper medical care.

He rejected the offer. “There is no cure,” said James, who spoke on the condition that his real name not be used. “There’s no sense in going into deep debt when there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.”

After he got the news several weeks ago, James went into a period of denial. When he finally decided to seek medical help, he couldn’t get an appointment until early December because clinics have been flooded with calls prompted by Johnson’s announcement.

James, who has suffered from night sweats and diarrhea, says he has “been having wild dreams--good and bad forces fighting for my soul. I saw a bunch of bright lights, but before I could get to them, I was snatched.”

But he won’t give up.

“It’s something that clicks in you. Everybody has it. You want to live. I want to fight it. I want to go kicking and screaming all the way.”

A file clerk wanted to know which bathroom he used, so she could use another. A supervisor didn’t want his condition discussed at the office--it might jeopardize your career, she told him.

But Jeffrey Hyres still is talking. He is a nurse, he has the AIDS virus, and he believes that he, like Magic Johnson, has a job to do: helping to bridge a chasm of ignorance about AIDS that runs deep, even in the medical field.

“There are a lot of people, health people, who aren’t as careful as they should be,” he said. “They have this attitude of ‘It can’t happen to me.’ It can. And it did.”

It happened to Hyres, 27, in March. He was drawing blood from an HIV-positive patient at the Seattle clinic where he works as a licensed practical nurse. The needle slipped, Hyres grabbed for it, and the point pierced his gloved hand.

When an HIV test came up positive, Hyres was numbed. He pushed aside initial thoughts of suicide but was plagued by other questions, chief among them: Should I quit nursing?

Honest talks with family, friends, doctors and members of his HIV support group helped him find answers.

Doctors said he was no risk to patients if he didn’t do invasive procedures that might exchange body fluids. But not everyone was supportive. Two co-workers asked that he not eat lunch in the break room. And he says his employers are nervous.

Hyres’ case already has made a difference. Colleagues are more careful about avoiding exposure. The hospital that runs his clinic has expanded a manual for handling needle-stickings from three pages to 12, and instructions are posted prominently. But for Hyres, it is too little, too late.

“I wish there were instructions everywhere before I got stuck,” he said, “because now I’m out of luck.”

Rubin Thomas grew up in a New York ghetto, started shooting heroin in 11th grade, switched to crack cocaine, had sex with men and women, was jailed for robbery, and then moved to Los Angeles and learned he had AIDS.

Now, two months after he stopped smoking crack, life has meaning for Thomas, despite his diagnosis.

“It’s a death sentence I can live with,” said the 40-year-old Harlem native. “All of us will die one day. None of us are promised tomorrow. Whatever time I have left on this Earth, I want to be quality time. . . . Even if I had to die tomorrow, I’ll die clean and sober and know I lived a good life for the few months I had.”

In August, Thomas was living in a “cardboard condominium” on Skid Row when he took an AIDS test. He broke into tears when he tested positive. He now has AIDS symptoms: night sweats, diarrhea and “opportunistic infections” like tuberculosis and herpes.

Fear of AIDS made Thomas quit heroin years ago. A bisexual, he thinks he got the disease because he didn’t use condoms during sex with men.

A month after Thomas entered a residential drug-treatment program, he heard the shocking news about Magic Johnson.

“Before Magic . . . I felt very much alone. Now it almost makes me stick my chest out a little bit,” he said.

“It just goes to prove we are all human beings. Magic Johnson, although he might be a famous basketball player, is a human being and makes mistakes like all of us do.”