‘One of the very fortunate few’: Diagnosed when it meant near-certain death, local lawyer reflects on 26 years HIV-positive

When Adam Grossman was told he was HIV-positive in 1990, the diagnosis was considered a death sentence. For nearly a decade, AIDS had ravaged the gay community from coast to coast and was about to become the number one cause of death for American men aged 25 to 44.

Between June of 1981, when the first cases of what would later become known as AIDS were reported in the United States, and the end of 1990, nearly 101,000 AIDS-related deaths had been reported to the Centers for Disease Control. Almost one-third of these deaths were reported during 1990.

Grossman, then a young law student, watched his partner die of AIDS. And he waited for what then seemed like an unescapable fate.

“I was one of the very fortunate few,” he said today in the Riverhead office where he’s practiced law for more than two decades.

“I was in a support group of maybe 20 people,” he recalled. Nearly all of them died. “I’m what is called a long-term survivor,” he said. “I was lucky.”

“For the first couple of years, it was considered untreatable. They hadn’t figured it out yet,” he said, referring to the development of drug treatments that would keep the virus at bay and prevent the development of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, which decimates the human immune system and leaves its victims vulnerable to a host of opportunistic infections and diseases that claim their lives.

“So it was rough — for me and lot of people,” Grossman recalled. “A lot of people I knew were dying. It’s very different experiencing it when you have it.”

For some reason that will likely remain forever unknown, Grossman’s immune system kept the virus in check long enough for him to benefit from new combination drug treatments that became available a few years after his diagnosis.

“My health is good,” Grossman, now 51, said today. He has served as Riverhead town attorney (1998-1999) and, since 2002, on the Southampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals. Last year he ran for Southampton Town Justice.

“I’m basically healthy. But HIV is a very tricky virus,” Grossman said. “It can mutate around treatments. This year, for the first time in all these years, my treatments stopped working,” he said. “My doctors thought I had lymphoma. I ended up having surgery. This was the first time for me, but others have a lot of issues with resistance to medications.”

The doctors changed up his medications and he has returned to good health.

“HIV is not a small thing to deal with,” Grossman said.

There is no cure for HIV and people infected with the virus will have to spend the rest of their lives managing it — unless a cure is discovered.

“Young people feel like they’re indestructible and think that there are medications for it so they don’t have to worry,” he said. “There are medications that keep you alive and can keep you healthy, but HIV has many implications for your life. It’s something you want to avoid.”

There is only one agency on the East End dedicated to assisting people with HIV: the David E. Rogers, MD Center for HIV/AIDS Care at Southampton Hospital. Founded in 1994, it is run by Greenport resident Michael Collins, who joined the center in 1999.

The Rogers Center has a client roster of more than 200 people, Collins said today. It provides a broad range of services, medical as well as mental health. It also provides free HIV testing as well as pre-exposure prophylaxis — medication to help prevent HIV infection. Other services include nutritionist counseling, transportation services for medical appointments, a wellness fund to help patients pay for medications, co-payments and things not covered by insurance. The center also offers hepatitis-C care, with or without HIV infection.

“Our goal is to keep patients with an undetectable viral load and keep them as healthy as possible,” Collins said.

“The medications really work miracles, but there’s not a cure — and there can be lasting side effects [from the medications]. It’s not something you want to have to deal with,” he said.

Collins, 66, has been working in the HIV field since 1987. “I lost my partner of eight years to AIDS,” he said. “I wanted to get involved. I’m an old-timer,” he said. Collins is being recognized this year for his efforts and achievements in the field with the “Distinguished Provider of the Year” award by the Nassau-Suffolk HIV Health Services Planning Council.

He moved from Texas to Long Island and got involved with the East End AIDS Wellness Project, which started the Long Island chapter of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The chapter has since been dissolved, he said.

“There is less interest in making quilts. Everyone is on meds and doing better,” Collins said. “We met a need at that time.”

Despite gains made in medical treatments for HIV and AIDS prevention — as well as the civil rights advances for gay people since the identification of the disease once called “the gay plague”— there remains a stigma attached to HIV.

World AIDS Day, marked each year on Dec. 1, is in part aimed at eliminating that stigma by raising awareness. It’s also a day set aside each year to remember the more than 678,000 people who’ve died of AIDS since 1981.

More than 1.2 million people in the U.S. are living with HIV today, according to the Centers for Disease Control — and 1 in 8 of them don’t know it.

While the number of new HIV diagnoses continues to decline, 39,513 people were diagnosed with HIV infection in the United States in 2015, the CDC says.