2-Year Nightmare Ends for Woman Wrongly Told She Had AIDS Virus : Health: After the error, she encountered prejudice and felt panic. But she sued and was awarded $600,000.

For two years, the AIDS virus ruled Vernelle Lowder’s life, dominating her waking thoughts, haunting her restless dreams.

She was overwhelmed by fear, depression, anger and despair. She encountered prejudice worse than any racism she ever experienced, and panicked at the onset of the slightest cold.

As it turns out, she never had the virus at all.

Sitting formally on the sofa in her tidy living room, Lowder, now 50, haltingly described 24 months spent under what she thought was a death sentence.

In 1980, she had received a blood transfusion during surgery at a hospital in this south Georgia city. During a checkup for a thyroid problem a decade later at a clinic in Hialeah, Fla., her blood was taken for testing.

On Nov. 13, 1990, her telephone rang.

“They said ‘Ms. Lowder, you need to come down to the clinic.’ I cleaned up and I went down there, and they told me I had AIDS. They said they didn’t know how much longer I have to live.”

“I got in the car and I drove,” she recalled. “Driving at a speed very high. I drove to my mother’s job. . . . I busted in screaming and hollering.”

Her mother tried to calm her, and drove her home.

Then came breaking the news to her three teen-age sons, her sole responsibility after her divorce and the subsequent death of their father.

“I told them I’m going to die--I’ve got the AIDS virus. The oldest one just looked at me. The youngest one didn’t say anything. The second one usually does the talking. He said, ‘We still love you--just don’t tell anybody.’ ”

From that night on, for the next two years, she lived with the belief that she carried HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, a frightening disease made all the more terrifying by her own lack of understanding and by the attitudes of those around her.

The mother of one of her children’s friends had died from AIDS, and that friend had been taunted and ostracized. Lowder also knew the family of another AIDS sufferer whose children couldn’t play with the neighbors’ children after word got out.

“They don’t want that to happen,” she recalled of her own youngsters.

“I told them I was scared. Real scared.”

But that night, she became angry too.

“I started thinking about my kids. Who’s going to take care of them the way I do? How long before I die? Why am I going to die? Why did it happen to me? I never bothered anybody.”

Immediately, she and her mother instituted what they considered safeguard measures against her infecting any family members. Lowder used separate dishes and glasses, scrubbed after each use with bleach. She wouldn’t let her sons kiss or even hug her.

She kept the television on continually in a usually unsuccessful effort to block out the thought of AIDS.

The nights were the worst.

“I’d go to bed every night thinking about dying. What color do you want the casket to be? What dress do you want to be buried in? How are your kids going to take it? How will people treat them? I was afraid to go to sleep.”

One night, she dreamed she was floating upward. She looked down and saw herself lying in bed, dying.

But scraps of encouragement nourished her in the weeks that followed.

A follow-up visit found her T-cell count, the white blood cells crucial to fighting infections, at a healthily high level. She joined a counseling group and learned about the virus, including that it was all right to hug and kiss her children, and got tips on how to tailor her diet and lifestyle to maintain her health.

Listening to other AIDS patients, she felt thankful that at least her family had stood by her. Others told of being abandoned by husbands, kicked out by parents, shunned by other relatives.

She so needed the comfort of the group, since the outside world offered little.

A nurse complained in front of Lowder about having to treat AIDS patients, and she walked into a church bathroom and overheard a conversation about her condition. A friend she had confided in betrayed her secret.

Soon, even her church no longer offered sanctuary.

“I would sit down at the end of the pew, sitting there by myself. Nobody else would sit in that row,” she said. “I felt like I was sitting on the outside.”

She remembers a church elder delivering a stinging talk about AIDS as a punishment for fornication and other sins.

“It was a very hurtful place,” recalled Lowder, who said the transfusion was her only risk factor for AIDS.

In late 1991, the television she depended on so much carried frequent stories on Kimberly Bergalis, the Florida woman labeled the first AIDS patient known to be infected during a medical procedure. As she developed full-blown AIDS, the once-vibrant woman deteriorated starkly and died at age 23.

“She got real poor-looking, all of a sudden,” Lowder said. “I was scared I’d be the same way.”

In 1992, her doctor put her on didanosine, or ddI, an AIDS treatment drug that brought on side effects that included vomiting and fatigue.

“I had put my kids through hell. They were scared for me,” she said.

She arranged to have legal custody transferred to her mother. Alone, she moved back to her hometown of Waycross from Miami, where she had lived, off and on, much of the 1980s, to await her own deterioration. She planned to interrupt it by committing suicide.

But when she joined a local hospice group for AIDS patients, counselors heard her story and noted that her T-cell counts had remained consistently high. At their suggestion, she was retested.

In the days of waiting that followed, she called and called the counselors to find out her results. She also developed a bad cold, which she worried would lead to worse complications.

Finally, in November, 1992, nearly two years to the day that she was told she was HIV-positive, another call came. She was told a taxi would pick her up, and then was greeted at the clinic with these words: “Guess what? Your HIV test came out negative!”

“I just couldn’t believe it,” she said. Then, after a long pause, she added quietly, “I sat down and prayed for a while.”

Assured that the results had been double-checked, she began calling her family with the incredible news. But the joy and relief soon turned to anger.

Less than a year later, Lowder sued the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services--the agency that performed the test--and the clinic and doctor who treated her.

In September, 1994, a jury awarded her $600,000 for pain and suffering, but cleared the clinic and said the bulk must be paid by the agency. Dr. Homer Kirkpatrick, who Lowder’s attorney says has moved out of Florida, paid $250,000.

Now, her attorney, Steve Mitchel of Miami, is seeking a legislator to sponsor the act that would be required to raise HRS’s damage payment from the $100,000 capped by statute for state agencies to the $350,000 ordered by the jury. Meanwhile, the agency has appealed the verdict.

Mitchel said false positives are not unusual. Dozens of people have contacted him since the verdict, he said, and he is contemplating several new lawsuits.