THE HUMAN CONDITION / FEAR OF THE MORTALLY ILL : Scared to Death

It’s the fear in people’s eyes that troubles Rosa Garcia-Viteri as much as anything. Always the fear. She sees it in the faces of otherwise clear-thinking friends and acquaintances at work, at the grocery store, at social gatherings.

Sometimes the fear is so strong, people turn away from her as though she had some highly communicable disease.

Garcia-Viteri does have a serious illness, but the last time anyone checked, breast cancer wasn’t contagious. No matter, says the 39-year-old Glendora resident, who has battled through surgery and two chemotherapy sessions over a seven-year period. In the minds of many, she might as well have leprosy.

“When some people find out you have cancer, you see terror in their eyes,” says Garcia-Viteri, a legislative analyst. “They can’t get away from you fast enough. They react like it’s contagious, even if they know it isn’t.”

Garcia-Viteri’s latest dose of “total rejection” came during a party during which she and her husband were discussing her therapy. A number of people overheard the conversation and reacted in a let’s-get-out-of-Dodge manner.

“They were attorneys,” says Garcia-Viteri. “Very well-educated, but that doesn’t matter. . . . They want to remove themselves from your presence. That hurts.”

It’s probably the last thing patients--and their families and friends--want to confront, but many of us are terrified of getting physically close to people who are terminally or seriously ill. We recoil from touching and comforting those who need it most.

“I see that all the time,” says Dr. Fawzy I. Fawzy, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the UCLA School of Medicine. “People are uncomfortable being close to a person they think is dying. For some, it’s too painful. They want to be miles away. For others, they have misconceptions about getting infected with a disease. What if they touch something and catch it?”

Fawzy has seen a wide range of concerns from misinformed people worried about catching--among other diseases--AIDS, cancer and leukemia.

“It comes from an intense fear of the unknown,” Fawzy says. “Death is an unknown entity. People are afraid of something they know there is no way back from.”

“Being close to someone who might be dying raises fears about your own mortality,” says Kathleen Ell, a professor of social work at USC who works with terminally ill patients and their families. “You don’t want to be confronted with pain, disfigurement, the unknown. You want to avoid that, so you avoid the person who is ill.”

Ginny Fleming is well acquainted with the mythology surrounding serious illnesses. As the director of emotional support services at the Los Angeles Shanti Foundation, a support group for AIDS patients and their families, she has run into a lot of them.

“I had one client who was a grandfather,” Fleming says. “His daughter and son-in-law wouldn’t allow him to hold his grandson.

“There was a mother who had a son with AIDS, and she allowed him in her house, but wherever he touched anything, she put on rubber gloves and scrubbed it down with ammonia.

“Another client of mine shook hands with a woman who was a reporter,” Fleming continues. “Even though the reporter said she knew AIDS couldn’t be passed that way, she told me she went and washed her hands 10 times.

“There’s so much fear and ignorance out there about a lot of diseases. Some people are so afraid that they completely avoid all physical contact with (terminally ill) patients.”

Sharon Young, 28, of Cerritos, says it was no coincidence that she lost more than a few friends when she was given an initial diagnosis of lung cancer in 1989. She lost a few more when doctors discovered ovarian cancer a year later.

“Some of my good friends--or so I thought--came to visit me in the hospital once. Then I never saw them again,” she says.

In addition, the parents of a family who in the past had asked Young to baby-sit their children suddenly stopped asking after her diagnosis.

Another cancer patient, 30-year-old Julie Robinson of Canoga Park, says that shortly after doctors informed her of the diagnosis and told her she would need chemotherapy, a longtime boyfriend asked: “Where did you pick that up?”

“I had to tell him, ‘You can’t get cancer from other people,’ ” she says. “You can’t get it from a toilet seat. But he was full of fear. I could see he was afraid of me.”

Their two-year relationship ended.

Although the boyfriend’s reaction was extreme, Fawzy estimates up to 50% of families and friends of seriously ill people cope with the problem by avoiding it in some way.

“They want to be away from it all because it’s hard, painful and awkward,” he says. “They want to distance themselves from it.”

Nitabelle Ellis, 33, of Valencia says her late husband, Rick, who died in June of lymphoma, noticed that friends and family members visited him less frequently as he became more ill.

“The family pushed themselves away from him,” Ellis says. “Friends didn’t come to see him as often. They didn’t want to see him. Once they were there, they were very loving. It was just hard to get them there.”

“Legitimate scientific studies indicate that the number of visits decrease as a patient approaches death,” says Edwin Shneidman, professor of thanatology (the study of death) at UCLA. “No matter how healthy you are, you are mortal, and that (realization) can be very scary.”

Nothing pounds that point into the psyche more than being around someone who is or is perceived to be dying, according to Carolyn Russell of Vital Options, a support group for cancer patients and their families.

“Fear exists, and it’s very strong,” she says. “We can’t see someone else dying without seeing ourselves there, and we know it’s going to happen to us. . . . And the best way not to think about it is to physically avoid that person.”

Russell, Fleming and others say the best way to deal with the fear of death and disease is to not shy away from people who are ill.

“If people can just get past their fear enough to look it in the eye, it can help them come to terms with mortality,” says Fleming. “They will realize, ‘Yes, death will happen to me, so how do I want to live my life?’

“Death will always be a mystery, but the closer I’ve looked at it, the less afraid I am.”

Rosa Garcia-Viteri doesn’t want to remind anyone of death. She doesn’t want to be scared; she doesn’t want to scare anyone else. She says she just wants to live as long as she can and make the most of her life.

“When I first got sick, I thought it was the end of the world,” she says. “I thought I was a freak of nature. But I have a good support system--friends and my husband have helped a lot. They hug me and are physically close.

“As for the people who stay away or act afraid, I want to tell them, and sometimes I do tell them, ‘Don’t worry, you can’t catch what I’ve got. I can’t hurt you.’

“I’m alive. I’m not ready to throw in the towel. I just wish everyone would look at it that way.”