A Model For Living

Though the AIDS epidemic has been explored on such TV series as “St. Elsewhere,” “Life Goes On” and “General Hospital,” NBC’s “ER” is breaking down stereotypes this season with its HIV-positive story line.

Last September, physician assistant Jeanie Boulet, played by Gloria Reuben, learned she was HIV-positive, having contracted the disease from her estranged husband who had unprotected sex with another woman. But she has continued working at the hospital.

“The story hasn’t been played on television before--someone who is HIV-positive and getting on with their life,” executive producer John Wells says. “There are millions of people in the U.S. who are going on with this experience and [television was] not chronicling it. It seemed to us like very fertile dramatic territory.”

The response from viewers, Wells says, has been overwhelming. “We have had lots and lots of mail. People have been very moved by it.”

Reuben recalls a recent encounter with a concerned fan in New York. “She said, ‘I feel like I know you because I went through this emotional experience with you,’ ” the actress says. “I am glad that people are feeling out there because a lot of this country is ‘dead.’ No one is feeling anything for anybody. It is all ‘me, me, me.’ ”

Still, Reuben, 32, acknowledges that the attention has been bittersweet. “Dealing with the public for the most part is OK, but you know, I think emotionally and almost psychologically it gets a little disturbing when a lot of people’s comments have to do with death,” she reports.

“They say, ‘Are you going to die?’ I always say, ‘No. Jeanie is going to be fine’--in order to get a line there between reality and fiction.”

Reuben has drawn from the experiences of HIV-positive friends for her role.

“I do know a few people who are positive, and from this happening to them, they have really learned to honor themselves and to really take care of themselves and to live for today,” she says. “I really admire how nothing is taken for granted.”

Selecting Boulet to carry the story line, Wells says, “seemed like a great way in and also, Gloria’s character is very sympathetic. We have only seen people on television die slow and painful deaths from HIV, having turned into full-blown AIDS. We felt we had a sympathetic character who people already have some emotional investment with rather than just seeing the person as a sick person and letting the audience members push that person away from them. We felt we had a character we could really get under the skin with.”

Since discovering she was HIV-positive, Boulet has struggled with whether to tell her co-workers and friends, especially since she was ostracized by her ex-lover, Dr. Benton (Eriq LaSalle), when he discovered her condition. Boulet, though, has received encouragement to remain in the emergency room from chief resident Dr. Kerry Weaver (Laura Innes), who guessed her status, and has thus far avoided any risky medical procedures.

Allen Carrier, spokesperson for AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA), commends “ER” for showing “the difficulty people have living with the virus. The focus on the struggle is very good.”

APLA, Carrier says, will be monitoring how the story develops “in terms of treatment options that are now available to people and how sickly an image they will portray her as having. What we found in the past is that [shows] tend to continue some of the myths and misconceptions about AIDS, and we see this as the first real opportunity in mainstream television--and certainly the No. 1 [rated] show--in debunking those myths.”

Wells says he and his staff did extensive medical research before production began, including meeting with Ben Schatz, executive director of the San Francisco-based Gay and Lesbian Medical Assn.

“We have worked with well over 1,000 HIV-positive health-care workers and know the situations they have experienced,” Schatz says. “To their credit, the folks at ‘ER’ really wanted to find out what the truth is. There are things I have seen on the show that have been impressively realistic in terms of issues of confidentiality and discrimination.”

“ER,” Schatz believes, is “providing a role model of both healthy people with HIV and of health-care workers with HIV, who are helpers and were helpers before they were affected and continue to be.”

Sherrie McNeeley, president of the American Academy of Physician Assistants, says the organization has been working with “ER” since Reuben’s character was introduced the first season.

“I get the impression what the writers are trying to do is portray honestly what’s happening in the real world,” McNeeley says. “There has only been one case--and that’s still questionable--in Florida, where a dentist transferred his HIV-positive status to a patient. [The producers] should be commended for further educating the public about not only HIV, but that health-care workers too can be HIV-positive.”

But not everybody is singing the praises of “ER.” Dr. Lonnie R. Bristow, immediate past president of the American Medical Assn., finds the Emmy Award-winning series “a highly dramatized, perhaps excessively dramatized show which takes literary and poetic license of medicine in the emergency room. It’s sort of an expensive, high-tech, nighttime soap opera of the worst kind. I personally don’t watch it because of the repeated episodes in which they are offensive about the real practices of emergency medicine.”

As for Reuben, she acknowledges that “it’s a lot” to carry such a dramatic, emotional story line.

“I’m aching to do a comedy,” she says. “The producers produce it and the writers write it, but I am the one who is out there doing it. But the good thing is that it’s not going to be heavy for the whole season. It’s not going to be the focus of Jeanie through the whole rest of the time she’s in the ER. It’s just another facet of her personality and character.”

* “ER” airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on NBC (Channel 4).