Innerviews: Coal miner's daughter earns legend status as pioneer AIDS nurse
She's a nurse. Not just any nurse. They call her a legend. A pioneer. Yvonne Lane started working in outpatient clinics at Charleston Area Medical Center in 1992, just as the AIDS scourge hit West Virginia. Calling on the innate compassion instilled by her parents, she threw herself into the role of AIDS activist and patient advocate.
She's a coal miner's daughter from Paint Creek, married at 16, mother of three, a survivor of bleak times in the coalfields. During one prolonged strike, People magazine profiled her family.
“I have no aspirations for management because it would take me away from the people who need me.”
The coal market crash of the late 1970s pushed her out of her home into a profession she embraces with a fierce and boundless passion. She's a nurse. Not just any nurse. They call her a legend. A pioneer.
Yvonne Lane started working in outpatient clinics at Charleston Area Medical Center in 1992, just as the AIDS scourge hit West Virginia. Calling on the innate compassion instilled by her parents, she threw herself into the role of AIDS activist and patient advocate. In the beginning, she watched them die, quickly, one after another. She fought for drugs and programs to help them. Now, if they mind her, she can promise them long, normal lives.
That journey, the mission to help, still drives her.
"I grew up in Holly Grove about 25 miles east of Charleston. My dad worked in a punch mine. We were very poor. We didn't realize how poor we were because I thought poor meant dirty, and we were clean.
"There were times when my dad made $8 a day, and he had three children. Even people on welfare had more than we did, but we were proud people, and we just made out the best we could.
"I met my husband when he came back from Vietnam. I was 16 when we got married. I graduated and finished dental assistant training at Carver. He wanted a family. After we were married two years, I had a baby. I had a baby in '72, '75 and '76. My career was to be a good mother and raise some fine citizens. And I did.
"When the bottom fell out of the coal market in the late '70s, every man in my family was out of work. No one could help anyone else. As bad as I didn't want to leave my family and go to work, I had no choice. The government had this program where they would pay a stipend for miner families to train to do something else. I took that test with 500 or 600 people to get into the Fayette County School of Practical Nursing. They only took 15 or 20. I went to school for a year and went to work for Beverly Health Care in a nursing home.
"In Kanawha County, the textbook controversy people pulled the miners out of work. They were picketing all the mines. Miners wouldn't cross the picket line. There was no help for anybody. We had to live off the land.
"My husband was out of work three years. When I finished my LPN training, he got a job as a core driller that took him out of town four or five days a week. He was very depressed, angry all the time. I tried to get him into treatment, but finally we divorced. After 17 years, I've met a wonderful man, Herb Bosley, and I'm getting married this year, a 54-year-old bride.
"During a bad strike in 1978, People magazine came to Elkins Supermarket in Hansford and asked the owners to tell them a family affected by the strike. People from New York came to our door in leather jackets and boots and chains and black hair. They had lots of beautiful equipment and were taking a gazillion pictures. It was interesting.
"But I felt the article was somewhat of a putdown. The writer said, 'To these people, geography is destiny. They're born here. They live here. They die here.' I resented that. Thirty years later, I realize that hippie chick knew what she was talking about. I won't leave my family.
"As an LPN, I worked in a nursing home, in a chiropractor's office and at South Charleston Community Hospital on a substance abuse unit. In school at Tech for my RN training, I still worked full time at the hospital. I don't know how I did it. I stayed on the dean's list.
"I came to work at CAMC in '89. After a couple of years, I transferred to outpatient clinics. I got involved with AIDS patients when people from out of state brought the disease to West Virginia. We started in '93 and '94. Dr. Elizabeth Funk, the infectious disease doctor, wanted to start an AIDS clinic.
She's a coal miner's daughter from Paint Creek, married at 16, mother of three, a survivor of bleak times in the coalfields. During one prolonged strike, People magazine profiled her family.
The coal market crash of the late 1970s pushed her out of her home into a profession she embraces with a fierce and boundless passion. She's a nurse. Not just any nurse. They call her a legend. A pioneer.
Yvonne Lane started working in outpatient clinics at Charleston Area Medical Center in 1992, just as the AIDS scourge hit West Virginia. Calling on the innate compassion instilled by her parents, she threw herself into the role of AIDS activist and patient advocate. In the beginning, she watched them die, quickly, one after another. She fought for drugs and programs to help them. Now, if they mind her, she can promise them long, normal lives.
That journey, the mission to help, still drives her.
"I grew up in Holly Grove about 25 miles east of Charleston. My dad worked in a punch mine. We were very poor. We didn't realize how poor we were because I thought poor meant dirty, and we were clean.
"There were times when my dad made $8 a day, and he had three children. Even people on welfare had more than we did, but we were proud people, and we just made out the best we could.
"I met my husband when he came back from Vietnam. I was 16 when we got married. I graduated and finished dental assistant training at Carver. He wanted a family. After we were married two years, I had a baby. I had a baby in '72, '75 and '76. My career was to be a good mother and raise some fine citizens. And I did.
"When the bottom fell out of the coal market in the late '70s, every man in my family was out of work. No one could help anyone else. As bad as I didn't want to leave my family and go to work, I had no choice. The government had this program where they would pay a stipend for miner families to train to do something else. I took that test with 500 or 600 people to get into the Fayette County School of Practical Nursing. They only took 15 or 20. I went to school for a year and went to work for Beverly Health Care in a nursing home.
"In Kanawha County, the textbook controversy people pulled the miners out of work. They were picketing all the mines. Miners wouldn't cross the picket line. There was no help for anybody. We had to live off the land.
"My husband was out of work three years. When I finished my LPN training, he got a job as a core driller that took him out of town four or five days a week. He was very depressed, angry all the time. I tried to get him into treatment, but finally we divorced. After 17 years, I've met a wonderful man, Herb Bosley, and I'm getting married this year, a 54-year-old bride.
"During a bad strike in 1978, People magazine came to Elkins Supermarket in Hansford and asked the owners to tell them a family affected by the strike. People from New York came to our door in leather jackets and boots and chains and black hair. They had lots of beautiful equipment and were taking a gazillion pictures. It was interesting.
"But I felt the article was somewhat of a putdown. The writer said, 'To these people, geography is destiny. They're born here. They live here. They die here.' I resented that. Thirty years later, I realize that hippie chick knew what she was talking about. I won't leave my family.
"As an LPN, I worked in a nursing home, in a chiropractor's office and at South Charleston Community Hospital on a substance abuse unit. In school at Tech for my RN training, I still worked full time at the hospital. I don't know how I did it. I stayed on the dean's list.
"I came to work at CAMC in '89. After a couple of years, I transferred to outpatient clinics. I got involved with AIDS patients when people from out of state brought the disease to West Virginia. We started in '93 and '94. Dr. Elizabeth Funk, the infectious disease doctor, wanted to start an AIDS clinic.
"I opposed her 100 percent. My thing here is training residents to do every disease. I said no, these doctors would be consumed with these patients with massive problems and won't learn diabetes, hypertension and cardiac. I lost that battle, thankfully.
"No one wanted to work the AIDS clinic. The other nurses were so afraid. My children were older, so I volunteered to be the nurse. The reason I'm a nurse is, if I had to leave my children and work, I wanted to do something that could make a difference to people. And certainly with this population, I have made a difference to them.
"In the beginning of AIDS, it was horrible. They deteriorated so rapidly. You were always putting out a fire. We were struggling. We had no textbook to tell us how to take care of these people.
"But I was there for them. I was there as a resource for the health department and as a resource for physicians. Physicians would call and say they tested someone positive for HIV and we had to take them. I would say, 'No, let us teach you to take care of them.' They'd say, 'Oh, no, I can't keep this patient. I will lose our staff.'
"Our door was open to everyone. I was so about taking care of them and making them feel better. They were getting these horrible infections. I wrote a grant for $10,000 to buy antibiotics for AIDS patients, and I got it. And I wrote another grant for $20,000, and I got it, and I spent it on medicines for them.
"Everybody would die in two years. Young and beautiful people, dying in two years. And seeing their friends die. Anything that happened to them, they would freak out, like, 'OK, I'm dying.' I tried to calm them and say, 'We are going to treat you with this antibiotic, and you are going to get well.'
"We were able to treat opportunistic infections, but I felt the anxiety they lived with was damaging their immune system as well as the HIV. So I wrote a grant for a support group, a counselor to teach them the difference between normal stuff and when you really are in trouble.
"It was a very hard time until we got the drugs we have now. We had AZT. That's about it. When we started getting drugs, the pill burden was incredible. Pills would be big as a 50-cent piece, and they would have to take 12 a day. These pills caused nausea, vomiting, diarrhea. It was a horrible thing.
"When they had to have nursing care at home, I asked to be the nurse. I went there and gave them their IVs and took care of them. When their CD4 count dropped to 50, I grieved their death. I would shut the door to this office and cry. I knew there was nothing we could do.
"Now, if they do what we say, they can have a long life and die of something else. Now we have HAART - Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy. We can keep these people healthy. I've got patients infected for greater than 20 years still working full time, so it's not a death sentence anymore.
"There is no disease in the history of mankind that has had the attention of HIV. There are 100 drugs in the pipeline, and you can't find 20 drugs in the pipeline for any other diagnosis. It is only going to get better.
"It's so treatable now that people are not being careful. They think, 'Oh, if I get that, I'll just take some medicine.' They aren't as frightened, and that is disturbing. I want everybody to be safe. I try to teach people to benefit themselves regardless of the problem. I've taught smoking cessation classes. I'm proud of my success.
"It is such a privilege to get to be here for people and make a difference for them. There is nothing in the world I would rather do. I just want to be a good nurse and take care of people. I have no aspirations for management because it would take me away from the people who need me."
To contact staff writer Sandy Wells, call 348-5173 or e-mail san...@wvgazette.com.
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