Love Nourishes Doctor’s AIDS Crusade : Lancaster: Susan Lawrence works to spread awareness in memory of ex-patient--her husband.

Sonny Bartz first visited Dr. Susan Lawrence in November, 1988, just after learning he had full-blown AIDS. Lawrence’s main practice was in treating cancer, but she was also the only doctor in the Antelope Valley to specialize in AIDS care.

For him, it was the beginning of the end. For both, it was the beginning of an unexpected love story.

“I’m a different person because of Sonny,” said the soft-spoken Lawrence, 38, who has two photographs on her desk of Bartz, who worked as a flight mechanic. One is of him standing in front of a jet at the Lockheed plant, receiving a “quality of work” award. The other is their wedding picture.

“He taught me so much about life, he was such a spiritual person,” she said. “If it wasn’t for him, I would not be doing the work I’m doing now.”

Shortly before Bartz died in July, Lawrence founded the first AIDS organization in the area, the Catalyst Foundation for AIDS Awareness and Care. The “care” part is mostly in the future--Lawrence hopes that the foundation will eventually provide comprehensive care for local people infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, regardless of their ability to pay. But the “awareness” began with a bang last month in this politically conservative area.

Lawrence and some of her associates went public with complaints against several local businesses that they said discriminate against people with acquired immune deficiency syndrome. One of their targets was a prominent local funeral home that refused to provide services for people who died of AIDS-related diseases.

The owner of the funeral home backed down when federal officials told him that his stance was illegal. The fervor brought publicity to the fledgling foundation, yet Lawrence insists that was not the aim of the action.

“We are not in this to finger-point,” she said. “We want to educate.”

But it’s clear that she isn’t about to back down, either.

“One of the lessons you can learn from AIDS is you have to take responsibility for your life,” she said. “You can stand up for what is right. You don’t have to sit back and be a victim.”

Lawrence came to the Antelope Valley in 1985, directly after finishing her oncology fellowship at the University of Texas. She established a practice specializing in cancer and blood diseases.

She also had, in her first year, about five AIDS patients. “Some of the treatments for them are similar to cancer treatments,” she said.

She was one of the few doctors in the area who would see AIDS patients. This was, she believes, at least partially because of a high level of homophobia in the area, with some medical workers feeling uncomfortable treating gay men, who made up the majority of AIDS cases.

But it was also due to a lack of experience in treating the disease. “Mostly, it’s not that doctors would refuse, it was that they did not have the expertise,” Lawrence said, “and most were not interested in getting it.”

Lawrence began reading medical journals dealing with AIDS and attending AIDS conferences. She soon got a reputation as the local AIDS doctor. Ironically, this kept some local people infected with HIV from coming to her.

“It was a matter of privacy,” Lawrence said. “This is a small town. There were people who felt if they were seen out in my waiting room, everyone would soon know.”

These people would mostly travel to Los Angeles for treatment. But local doctors and hospitals were increasingly making referrals to her. “People would get handed a slip of paper when they were discharged from the hospital,” she said, “telling them to go see Dr. Lawrence.”

Bartz got one of those slips.

“I went and saw Susan, because she was supposed to be the best expert in town,” Bartz said in an video he made with Lawrence a few months before he died.

Bartz had began using heroin and other illicit, intravenous drugs while still a teen-ager. It was not until 1985, after two failed marriages and some frightening episodes on drugs and alcohol, that he got clean and sober at a Palmdale clinic. He had an HIV test at the time and it came out negative.

“I thought I had gotten away with it,” Bartz said on the tape.

But in 1988, he came down with what he thought was a terrible case of the flu. It was Pneumocystis pneumonia, a severe lung condition contracted only by people with AIDS.

“The test was relatively new when he had it in the clinic,” Lawrence said, “and not as reliable as it is now. It had been false.”

On the videotape, Bartz looks a good deal older than his 47 years. His speech is halting, and he loses the thread of his thoughts easily.

When he first saw Lawrence, the disease had not taken nearly as much of a toll. He was able to return to work and few people knew he had AIDS. For a year and a half, they had a normal doctor-patient relationship.

But Lawrence, who was an intensely private person and thought that she would never marry, was feeling that Bartz might be more than a patient to her. She was attracted by the ease in which he seemed to get along with people.

“I could never sit in a restaurant at a counter next to someone I didn’t know,” Lawrence tells him on the videotape, adding that she lacked the ability to make small talk. “I thought they wanted to delve in here and get my deepest, darkest secrets.”

She invited Bartz to go with her to see a movie, “Fantasia,” and the romance began. “Finally, we realized we loved each other,” she said.

With their personal relationship evolving, they had to make some hard choices about their professional relationship. Medical ethics frowns upon doctors caring for those in their own families. “It brings up questions about power and judgment,” Lawrence said.

They eventually decided that she would continue as his AIDS doctor.

“We were very, very clear about this,” Lawrence said. “He had a regular family doctor he would see on a regular basis. We had the support of consultants we could see. We went into therapy, as a couple and individually.”

She saw her role, professionally, as someone who would clearly delineate his treatment choices. “I had the medical expertise,” Lawrence said. “I would explain the options that he had and he had to choose. If I didn’t like his choices, I still had to respect them.”

Another choice that they made was not to have sex, even with protection of a condom. “That was our decision. We were not willing to tolerate any risk,” she said. “I’m not saying it’s the right decision for everyone in that situation.”

In March, 1992, they were married in Las Vegas. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Bartz said on the tape.

Bartz had quit work because of his weakened physical condition. Not long after they married, it became apparent that his mind was also being affected. He was exhibiting signs of AIDS dementia.

“It was getting to the point where he was doing things dangerous to himself and others,” she said.

Lawrence hospitalized him, against his will, in Los Angeles, but it was a disaster. At one point, Bartz simply walked out of the hospital and took a taxi all the way back to Lancaster.

Lawrence eventually found a specialist familiar with AIDS dementia, who put Bartz on medications that curbed the erratic behavior. He came home, and in September, Lawrence found through contacts with a Los Angeles home care agency a live-in helper.

“When I was hired, Sonny was pretty bad,” said Brian Maxey, 24, who had recently completed a course in AIDS home care at a community college. “I was told he probably only had three weeks to maybe a couple of months.”

Maxey, who is gay and himself HIV-positive, was not eager to spend a long time with Bartz. “Sonny represented everything in a heterosexual male that I didn’t like,” Maxey said. “He was to some extent a womanizer. He was obnoxious at times. I think if we would have just met somewhere, we would have hated each other.”

But Bartz’s macho behavior was a front, Maxey began to believe, for a man who had a great capacity for tenderness and caring. As Bartz’s condition improved, the two men grew close.

Bartz became well enough to venture out of the house, and that’s when Lawrence learned, firsthand, about AIDS discrimination. She tried to enroll him at a private physical therapy center, but was told that the staff feared that they might get AIDS from Bartz.

“These people were providing health services, but their ignorance was incredible,” Lawrence said.

A gym, which advertised that it specialized in workouts for the disabled, also turned her down. “They said right to me that having Sonny there would be bad for their business,” she said.

When Lawrence speaks in public about AIDS, she often talks about these personal experiences. “I tell you it’s very painful when someone you love is dying and they are told they are not wanted,” Lawrence recently said to a health class at Palmdale High School. “All people are really asking for is compassion and respect.

“Maybe that is one of the lessons we can learn from AIDS.”

Lawrence was now seeing about 40 AIDS patients annually in her practice, but knew that although there were no HIV statistics specific to the Antelope Valley, there were probably to be many more infected. But many had no insurance and were therefore using county health services in the San Fernando Valley.

Lawrence wanted to create a nonprofit foundation that would seek grant funding to provide local care for the uninsured. She asked Maxey to join her as the foundation’s one paid employee. They put together an agenda that also included a volunteer AIDS buddy program, transportation, house cleaning and pet-care services.

Their first training session for volunteers drew 46 people, most of whom were heterosexual women. “You would expect that more gay men would have volunteered, but up here so many of them are in the closet,” Maxey said.

A couple of weeks ago, Catalyst was formally given nonprofit status, and Lawrence has spent much of her time researching and writing grant proposals. She has cut her practice back while building the foundation and hopes to soon raise enough in funding so that she can hire a full-time doctor to free her for administrative duties.

Bartz died July 25 at home with Lawrence, Maxey and Lawrence’s medical assistant present. He had been in a coma for three days.

“We did it exactly the way he wanted,” Lawrence said. “He didn’t want an IV, he didn’t want us to keep him going when he reached that point.”

Lawrence looked over at the picture of she and Sonny on their wedding day, standing in front of the limousine the wedding chapel had sent to their hotel. They looked secure, content.

“I really love to talk about him,” she said. “He was my only family.”

Lawrence was an only child, and by the time she and Bartz were married, her parents had died.

“With the holidays here, I miss him a lot,” she said. “But what he did for me is something I will remember for the rest of my life.”

Lawrence often talks about the lessons that can be learned from AIDS concerning mortality, tolerance and compassion. But for her, the most important lessons learned from her experiences with Sonny were deeply personal.

“I never thought I was a person who would get married,” she said. “I didn’t think I had the capacity for that kind of relationship. I wasn’t connected to people in that way.

“It was Sonny who taught me how to live in the world.”