Inside the HIV/AIDS nonprofit the Women’s Collective, Sabrina Heard walked a 37-year-old client with HIV into a private room for a serious talk at the end of a long day.
Would she, Heard asked, be able to keep an upcoming doctor’s appointment?
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“I’m struggling to see if I can go. If I don’t, I won’t get medicine,” said the woman, an unemployed mother of four who knew the risks of going without. “I want a vacation.”
Heard, a community health worker who also has HIV, gave her an exasperated look, then stretched out her arms and palms.
“Put your hands on the table. I want to touch your hands now,” Heard said. She clasped the woman’s hands tightly. “This may be new for you. I remember when it was new for me.”
At the Women’s Collective, a one-floor clinic in a Northeast Washington strip mall with a liquor store and pawnshop, a single day spent with Heard can illuminate the battles of HIV/AIDS patients in granular, raw detail.
Each step of her day, Heard, 55, juggles the complexities of her own diagnosis, complicated now by a nettlesome change in her Medicaid status. But she soldiers on, dispensing cheerful, tough therapy to her clients with HIV and walk-ins who need to be tested.
Here, people stricken with HIV or AIDS talk to case managers for help navigating hospitals, medical appointments, obtaining the right medicines or gathering the strength to talk honestly with doctors about their symptoms. With 18 employees, the organization operates on a $1.6 million budget and gets about $300,000 from the city, half as much as the city’s allocation a few years ago, according to its founder, Patricia Nalls.
The Women’s Collective largely looks like any other office. But there are signs of its sensitive nature — a room with free children’s clothes, another with free food. Way in the back, there is a makeshift altar with candles and funeral programs adorned with the faces of former clients who have died of the disease.
Heard, dressed in purple jean leggings and an orange dashiki, began her day at 9 a.m., reviewing four patients’ CD4 blood counts, which represent the number of cells attacked by the AIDS virus in a microliter of blood. One was just below 200, the point at which the disease is considered advanced. Another was 85. Another was 535. The fourth’s count was missing from the file.
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Heard said she rarely regrets her life choices, even though she admits they were reckless.
A Chicago native, Heard moved here in the late 1970s to attend Howard University. Her mom worked in a lamp factory, her dad worked at a paint plant, but Heard wanted to be a theater costumer designer.
She got sidetracked. She ended up having two children with two separate men; by 1984, she had dropped out to care for her children.
Heard fell into the District’s crack scene and became a regular at the city’s open-air Hanover Street drug market, buying $50 bags of powder and weed laced with a hallucinogen.
She enjoyed men, she said. By the late 1980s, she had a third child with a third man.
Living mostly off city subsidies for low-income parents, Heard worked odd jobs at day-care centers or as a seamstress. One of her boyfriends was abusive, she said.
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