‘Now Is the Time to Fight’ for Ariel

Larry Jacobs’ “dear friend” letter doesn’t just tug at your heartstrings. It yanks.

First, there’s that photo of a winsome little girl hugging a pair of Weimaraners.

Her name is Ariel. She’s 12 and she’s Larry’s daughter. And she is infected with HIV.

“That picture is absolutely not fair,” Larry says. “Two dogs and a little girl staring at you.”

There’s not a hint of remorse in his voice. He’s a man with a mission: to raise $250,000 for the Childrens AIDS Center at Childrens Hospital, where Ari is one of 120 patients 12 and younger receiving treatment--and hope.

Last September, Jacobs, 46, a partner in a Santa Monica-based accounting firm, learned from Ari that the center was in financial trouble. He wanted to help. He decided to write a letter, asking others to help. “Let’s not have an executive committee,” he wrote. “Let’s not have a banquet, let’s not have an ad book or a journal. Let’s just have a purpose and a goal . . . do your best.”

Since mid-December, 150 letters have gone out and Larry is almost halfway toward his goal. Senior citizens recruited by his in-laws in Florida sent $10 checks; Baby Guess, a client of his firm, gave $15,000. In lieu of a 20th anniversary party, his firm, Stonefield Josephson, gave $20,000.

Larry has turned over $50,000 to the Childrens AIDS Center and has pledges of another $50,000.

The money may ensure another year of survival for the center, which raised only $100,000 last year on its own.

With an annual budget of $1 million to serve about 200 patients, including those in a risk-reduction clinic for HIV-infected young adults and those in a comprehensive care program for hemophiliacs, “we run short about $250,000 a year,” says Dr. Joseph Church, the center’s director.

The hospital has always bridged the gap in the past but, Church says, Childrens Hospital, like all teaching hospitals, is struggling and may not have the money to give to the center when funding time rolls around July 1.

About 80% of the center’s patients are covered under MediCal, which reimburses the hospital 30 cents on the dollar. “That,” Church says, “is the community that HIV hits for the most part.”

Ari, a child of the upper middle class, is an exception. Her story begins at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Sept. 19, 1982, when, after two miscarriages, Robin Jacobs delivered a full-term 7 pound, 7 ounce baby by Cesarean section. She recalls: “As she was coming out, someone said, ‘Oh, my God, she’s yellow.’ ”

Jaundiced as a result of blood type incompatibility, the baby needed a transfusion. This caused the Jacobses little concern. “Who’d heard of AIDS?” Larry Jacobs asks.

Soon, horror stories about the epidemic began emerging. When Ari was 5, doctors at Cedars identified her as among those who might have received contaminated blood. “We had her tested,” says Robin, 45. “She was positive.”

For three years, they segued between anger and denial, telling no one, unsure how friends and family might react. One day Robin heard Ari say to a friend, “Don’t pay any attention to my mother. She cries all the time because she loves us so much.”

Larry slid into a “poor me” funk: “I never win the lottery, but I got this one.” He says, “It took me a long time to realize that I wasn’t the victim. Ari is the victim.”

When Ari was 9, her parents leveled with her, not willing to be part of some awful deceit. “Ari knows everything,” Robin says. Her initial, childlike reaction: She wanted to tell everyone she had the same disease as Magic Johnson, who had recently gone public.

They also told Ari’s brother Ethan, then 13. Her adopted brother, David, was then 5 and understood only that Ari was very sick.

Hesitantly, the Jacobses began telling close friends. Ethan’s teen-age friends were told too. Robin wanted them to know: “If somebody like Ari can have it, how safe is anybody?”

“Ari has not lost a single playmate,” Robin says. Robin’s friends became a support group who assist with Ari’s in-home medical care. To have insurance for Ari, Robin returned to her job as a special education teacher at Erwin Street Elementary School in Van Nuys in 1990.

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AZT, DDI, IV lines delivering antibiotics all are weapons in Ari’s fight against HIV’s attack on her immune system. She has battled thrush, severe rashes, shingles, high fevers.

Hospitalized four times last year, Ari is no longer in school and has an in-home teacher five hours a week. A woman comes in daily to care for her while the Jacobses are at work.

Larry and Robin do not talk in terms of prognosis. “There is no prognosis,” Larry says. “We have a manageable terminal illness.”

“Ari knows that there’s no cure,” Robin says, but, like her parents, she hopes for a medical miracle. Says Larry: “She knows children who have died and she’s afraid of getting too skinny because she knows that kids waste away first.”

Because Ari equates death with being alone, without Mom and Dad, Robin has made it a point to “talk about how our souls stay together” forever.

But for now--with faith in Church and the center staff--the family dares to make long-range plans. Among these: Ari’s bat mitzvah in July.

There will be a healing service and her Hebrew name will be changed from Batya to Batya Chaya, in hopes it will change the course of her life. Chaya has its roots in the Hebrew word for life. Another way of “fooling the angel of death,” Larry says.

With Ari, Church says, “We’ve been dealing with potential disasters for quite a number of years now. Every time something serious develops, we’ve been able to beat it back.

“If I thought her situation was hopeless, I would be very direct with Ariel and her family.” Church looks on each good day for Ari as a victory.

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The Childrens AIDS Center is a place where Ari and other children can confide their darkest fears to social workers. Where a dietitian helps them find foods to ignite their appetites. Where fun helps dull the pain.

Ari, Church says, is “a remarkable child--medically quite astute, not shy to express her opinions. And she has a very healthy attitude toward a very difficult situation.”

He has special words, too, for Larry. “It takes dads a long time to deal with this. Dads, like doctors, are supposed to be able to take care of problems. Mr. Jacobs, with a great deal of soul-searching, has decided now is the time to fight. Some families never get to that point.”

Married 18 years, the Jacobses head up a strong family that has not allowed gloom to envelop it. Larry calls Robin extraordinary. He makes terrible jokes; she laughs. Ari roughhouses with David at their Northridge home.

Robin says Church is one reason Ari “is still around. He’s phenomenal.”

The other reason? Ari, 63 pounds of grit.

“They picked on the wrong little girl,” Larry says. “This little girl’s not going to take it sitting down. She’s feisty, and she’s got an attitude.”

One day, as Ari and Ethan were having a squabble, Ari stopped, hands planted defiantly on hips, and threatened him: “ . . . and I’m going to live to be 80!”

Someday, Larry Jacobs is sure, Ariel Jacobs will be on the cover of Time magazine with a headline screaming, “SHE BEAT IT!”

Meanwhile, he says, “When I grow up, I’d like to be just like her.”