The Anger Of Aids -- Kimberly Bergalis Is Dying, And She Wants To Tell You What It's Really Like

FORT PIERCE, Fla. - Here are two things you have never seen in Kimberly Bergalis, who has AIDS.

Her anger: "Do I blame myself? I sure don't. . . . I blame (dentist David) Acer and every single one of you bastards. Anyone that knew Dr. Acer was infected and had full-blown AIDS and stood by not doing a damned thing about it. You are all just as guilty as he was."

Her pain: "I have lived to see my hair fall out, my body lose over 40 pounds, blisters on my sides. I've lived to go through nausea and vomiting, continual night sweats, chronic fevers of 103 to 104 that don't go away anymore. I have cramping and diarrhea. . . . I have lived through the torturous acne that infested my face and neck - brought on by AZT."

Bergalis, 23, is no longer the delicate but beautiful woman who appeared on national talk shows, in hot-air balloons or on windswept beaches. That was months ago, when she was the strong, mature-beyond-her-years college grad who contracted acquired immune deficiency syndrome from her dentist during a 1987 office visit.

Now, she spends her days in agony, drifting in and out of consciousness. Her body resembles a jumble of broken match sticks. She weighs maybe 70 pounds. She hasn't eaten solid food in two months. She must be carried to the toilet. A rust-colored paste cakes her tongue.

"She'd like to die," says George Bergalis, her father. "That's foremost in her mind. She just continually questions why God hasn't taken her yet. Death, as far as she's concerned, will be a relief.

"We don't pray for miracles anymore, we pray for her to pass on as quickly and as painlessly as possible."

But before she dies, she desperately wants you to see her. To see AIDS.

"People never saw the down side of her condition," her father says. "This is the real AIDS, the way people really get. It's not a pretty picture."

She can barely talk now. She makes sounds, but her mouth cannot form shapes. Her words above are from a letter she wrote April 6 to Nikki Economou, an investigator with the state Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. It is an extraordinary, and bitter, account of her body's destruction. Is she glad she wrote it?

"Yes," she said yesterday, her blue eyes sharp against her sunken face. "Very happy."

"It's the first time she came out and expressed anger," her father said. "She was keeping that inside."

In September 1987, Stuart dentist David Acer was diagnosed as having full-blown AIDS. Three months later, Bergalis, a University of Florida college student, entered his office to have some molars extracted.

It would take two years before Bergalis, then 21, also was diagnosed with AIDS. Last August, she learned from the federal Centers for Disease Control that Acer (who would die one month later) was the source. It was the first time a patient ever had contracted AIDS from a doctor or dentist.

And she would not be the only one. According to the CDC, Acer also infected four other patients.

Bergalis sat down with her family and their attorney, Bob Montgomery. Together, they decided she would devote the time she had left to lobby for mandatory AIDS testing for health-care workers and full disclosure of AIDS status between doctors and patients.

"She's going to be in every history book written from now on," said Barbara Webb, 65, a retired schoolteacher and one of the five Acer patients who tested positive for virus that causes AIDS, human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. "She is the prime inspiration for the movement toward mandatory testing."

The movement has drawn significant opposition from the medical establishment. In January, both the American Medical Association and the American Dental Association added new guidelines asking physicians infected with the AIDS virus to either stop performing invasive medical procedures or disclose their HIV status to patients. However, neither the state nor the national organizations have recommended mandatory testing or disclosure.

"AIDS is a confidential disease," said Dr. James Howell, district director of the AIDS program for Florida's Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services. He said that state regulatory boards are setting new standards for reporting infectious diseases.

He declined to discuss Bergalis' letter. "It's a hell of a way to die," he said.

Kimberly Bergalis agrees.

"Do you know what it's like to look at yourself in a full-length mirror before you shower - and you only see a skeleton?" she wrote in her letter. "Do you know what I did? I slid to the floor, and I cried. Now, I shower with a blanket over the mirror."

Her family - her parents, her sisters, Allison, 19, and Sondra, 11 - meanwhile, is determined to carry on as normally as possible.

"We're not about to maintain a death vigil," George Bergalis said. "We're not going to gather around her bed and wait for her to die."