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“It’s time to close the book on infectious diseases.” — U.S. Surgeon General William H. Stewart, 1967.

As a medical student studying infectious diseases at the time, Dr. Tim Lane might have been discouraged by such a pronouncement, had he been paying attention. There was reason for the surgeon general to be optimistic. Polio and tuberculosis had been nearly defeated. Vaccines had been created for measles, mumps and rubella. Life expectancy was rising.

Infectious disease was not a sexy field of medicine, but Lane was drawn to it nonetheless.

“It was a nice thing to go into because we had all these antibiotics to fix things,” he recalls.

He could not know that the book on infectious disease was far from closed. An infectious disease pandemic was coming that would devastate the human immune system, defy any known remedy, and define his career.

When the AIDS epidemic reached Greensboro, it came to the office of Dr. Tim Lane. Many regard him as one of Greensboro’s unsung heroes for his compassionate care of people with AIDS, his tireless efforts to educate the public, and his matter-of-fact advocacy of human rights.

Some people in this world are at their very best when things are worst. Lane, 65, is one of them.

He has a huge heart, and unlike many doctors, he wears it on his sleeve.

“He always has that twinkle in his eye, and it often has a tear in it,” says Addison Ore, executive director of Triad Health Project, a nonprofit AIDS support organization.
He is honored and humbled by such praise. He says his work in caring for AIDS patients is his proudest achievement.

“I haven’t developed a vaccine or led any major research efforts, but I was involved in taking care of some incredibly good people,” he says.

It tested him, as a physician and human being, he says, especially in the early years, “when all we had were words and good intentions.”

* * *

In the rural town in northern Maine where Timothy Walter Lane was born, medical care was still scarce and primitive. He grew up across the street from the community hospital, which was housed in a converted Victorian home. His parents lost a daughter to pneumonia and meningitis before he was born. A brother died from an asthma attack.

“It motivated me to find an answer,” he says.

His first day at Cornell University Medical College, they began with gross anatomy. “After a few words of introduction, the professor said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, your cadavers await you.’ And where did we start? The face! The soul of the human body.”

After a few weeks, one woman balled up her lab coat, threw it on the floor and said, “Not for me!”

“You have to be willing to look suffering in the eye and put it in some kind of compartment,” Lane says. “You still have compassion, but you can also go home and still have a life.”
He remembers the day during his residency when a fourth-year medical student learned her young patient had acute leukemia. She began to cry.

“The instructor said, 'It’s OK to cry. It’s normal. This is a tragedy. As you get more experience, you won’t cry openly.’ So you still have empathy, but a little distance.”
Mastering that emotional balancing act would be essential in the years to come.

* * * 

It was 29 years ago this week that Lane got the call about his first AIDS patient. The Greensboro native had been living in New York, and his sister wanted to bring him home. He had been sick for months, and the doctors said he had what was then called GRIDS — Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Syndrome. Lane had read about it in the CDC weekly reports starting in 1981.

When the man arrived in Greensboro, he was immediately admitted to Moses Cone Hospital, where Lane started aggressive treatments for fungal cryptococcal meningitis.
“But I began to see that this was going to plow on, and we were impotent to stop it because he had an irrevocably damaged immune system,” Lane says.

The patient died five weeks later.

He says it was the saddest thing he ever experienced in medical practice.

“The first time seeing it was just indelible,” he says. “To see such suffering of this young man, his sister and parents grieving. The years of life, the raw potential that is lost. It was something akin to the Dark Ages — the plague.”

Soon, a trickle of AIDS patients would become a flood, and he would be helpless to save those people, too.

He was, for the next decade, managing death.

“I learned a lot about end-of-life care,” he says. “What you want at that time is forgiveness. You want to be praised a little bit. You want to feel accepted, and you want to be around people who love you.

“That’s what Bruce and Johnny did,” he says. “And I learned that love is all you need. It’s the ultimate penicillin — human support and understanding.”

Bruce Thede and Johnny McGee founded Triad Health Project in 1986. The hysteria around AIDS is hard for people to imagine now, but patients were often shunned by family, strangers, and even to some extent, medical professionals.

“People were so afraid. The food trays would be sitting outside the door (of the hospital rooms),” says Sharon Lipscomb, director of High Point services for Triad Health Project. “I remember little red dots being on the door to denote people with AIDS. It was so disheartening.”

The running joke around hospitals at the time was that AIDS patients would be put on the pizza diet because it was the only thing you could shove under the door, Lane recalls. He made sure the staff at Cone was educated about safety but not fearful of patients. He replaced the stickers that denoted AIDS patients with something more subtle.

“A lot of people lived alone and died alone,” Lipscomb says. “Dr. Lane wanted to make sure people died with dignity — to know we cared, we loved them and were doing all we could to enhance their lives.”

Lane, his head nurse, and a hospital social services representative met regularly with McGee and other THP representatives to keep them up to date on new cases and patient needs.

“I was surprised, and I was pleased to be respected,” McGee recalls. “He was very caring and compassionate with patients. He listened to what they had to say. If they said they had a need, he would call us.”

He also responded quickly if THP workers encountered problems at the hospital.

“He really set the tone,” Thede says. “You didn’t mess with Tim. He had this quiet voice and a manner that (communicated to people) that this is the way it should be, and that was it. If we had trouble someplace, all we had to do was tell one of them, and they swooped.”

Lane did an AIDS 101 talk at every THP buddy training session, and he found meeting space for them at the Area Health Education Center.

To this day, the people who witnessed the inhumanity that AIDS sufferers often faced get choked up when they talk about the compassionate care they witnessed at Cone.

“(Lane) has a comforting spirit about him,” Lipscomb says. “I don’t know what we would have done at Triad Health Project without him. It brings tears to my eyes when I think about him.”

For Lane, the heroes were the folks at THP, “these incredible people whose hearts and souls were exposed,” willing to do whatever it took to help people.

“There were times when I thought, can I do this for the next 25 years — treat people with a disease that had a 100 percent mortality rate?” Lane says. “If it hadn’t been for THP and Hospice, it would have been very hard.”

Lane also relied on his family — wife Robin and three children — for support. He talked to medical colleagues and his neighborhood priest.

“Death was in front of you all the time,” he says. “We would have 20 people in the process of dying at any given time. They were young and many estranged from their families.

“But love flourishes even in barren soil. It was an amazing thing to see families pull together, see wounds heal. Your faith in humanity was restored at those times.”

* * *

Humbling. That’s a word Lane uses a lot in talking about AIDS. It humbled him as a physician who encountered a disease he couldn’t defeat. It humbled him as a human being who realized he had been ignorant and unaware of other lives.

“It made me palpably aware that being gay is part of the human condition,” Lane says. “It is worldwide. Human rights around gay issues is incredibly important.”

A product of the Irish-American middle class with a Roman Catholic upbringing, he had always thought of gay people as different and strange. The AIDS epidemic brought him face to face with gay people from all walks of life. And for the first time, he connected with them as human beings, as individuals.

“It was a great life lesson,” he says. “It opened my eyes to the world.”

If there is a silver lining to the AIDS epidemic, it’s that many other people made that realization as well, Lane says.

The downside is that despite the fact that anyone can get AIDS, the concentration of the disease has been in minority populations — gay people, IV drug users, and people of color. It has stricken poor populations around the world where the sex trade thrives as an economic necessity.

“The stigma associated with it drives the disease,” he says.

He recalls a fellow physician’s shock to find out a smart, successful relative had HIV.

“He said, 'How could this happen?’ ” Lane says. “Well, it happens because we’re frail. We have needs. We suspend proper judgement. We make mistakes.

“But there is a great deal of denial, and it’s one of the great stumbling blocks in getting people tested. They don’t want to know, and they are the ones spreading the virus.”

* * *

Lane laughs when he recalls the day in 1978 he arrived at Moses Cone as the hospital’s first infectious disease specialist.

“I’m glad you’re here,” said one of the staff members who recruited him, “but I don’t know if there will be a damned thing for you to do.”

In the peak years of the epidemic, Lane was seeing 200 AIDS patients at any given time, half of whom were in advanced stages of the disease. They got horribly sick, wasted away, and died within months.

To think that he would one day be counseling an AIDS patient to lose a few pounds as long-term prevention against heart disease was unthinkable.

But that’s just what he was doing recently at the newly opened Infectious Disease Clinic located on Wendover Avenue.

The patient is 57, co-infected with HIV and Hepatitis C from a partner who was an IV drug user. He’s been treating her for 12 years.

The introduction of antiviral drugs in 1995 finally gave doctors like Lane effective tools to fight HIV. Drug cocktails — as many as 30 pills per day — have now been reduced to a once-a-day pill, Atripla. The patients he treats now are like old friends, he says.

Some 1,500 HIV-infected people are served by the clinic, and it gets 200 new referrals each year. With a staff of six physicians and a nurse practitioner, Lane has reduced his patient load. He teaches and mentors UNC medical students at Cone, participates in ongoing AIDS research studies, and works on infection prevention measures at the hospital.

“I’d like to do this for a few more years, but I can’t do it forever,” Lane says. “The biggest thrill is being able to take care of people and share that with students and residents. What a wonderful career. You use your heart and your mind, and you mix those things up. When you get it right, you feel extremely good about it.”

Contact Susan Ladd at 373-7006 or susan.ladd@news-record.com