Long-term patient describes his battle and searches for reasons why he's beaten the odds

06/04/2001

By SHERRY JACOBSON / The Dallas Morning News

Dennis Vercher sits at his uncluttered desk, poring over a lineup of stories for the next edition of the local gay community newspaper.

As editor of the Dallas Voice, he is juggling assignments among free-lance writers and three staff reporters. He isn't really thinking about the fact that his own life as a long-term AIDS survivor is among the most noteworthy stories of the coming week.

Even as the epidemic moves into its third decade, Mr. Vercher isn't the kind of AIDS patient to call attention to his plight. Asked to explain how he has survived 14 years with AIDS when so many others have not, he struggles for the right answer.

"I've always put my faith in the medical establishment, and through some lucky strokes of timing, they came through with what I needed, when I needed it," he says.

"I got [the drug] AZT at a time when it was in short supply and restricted to only certain patients," he recalls of his first bout of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987. He also got aerosolized pentamidine when it was an experimental drug in the late 1980s. Since 1995, he has ingested a daily "cocktail" of anti-AIDS drugs that make it possible for him to maintain a normal work life.

But the 48-year-old editor is not completely satisfied with this purely medical answer. Could there be something else to explain what got him through years of AIDS-related illnesses including pneumonia, chronic phlebitis and a lung infection that required extensive surgery just a few years ago?

"I've been blessed with a strong immune system," he offers. "Our old family doctor used to say he'd never seen anything like us Vercher boys. When we were young, my mother would bring my two brothers and me to the doctor when we were sick as dogs. He'd give us some kind of shot and we'd be perfectly well the next day. It was amazing."

Mr. Vercher pauses again. It probably didn't hurt, he says, that he has always felt that he could beat AIDS.

"Attitude does play a role in the way anybody responds to a disease," he says. But fearing that he might offend anyone who has felt emotionally defeated by having AIDS, he quickly adds, "I don't want to overemphasize that aspect too much."

When his answers still don't seem to add up to a satisfactory explanation for his longevity, Mr. Vercher turns to the possibility of chance. "I'm just one of the lucky ones," he says.

In fact, the Dallas County Health Department says that of the county's 460 adults found to have AIDS in 1987, only 14 are still alive, including Mr. Vercher. That means 97 percent of them didn't make it.

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If there is anything positive that can be said as the nation moves into its third decade of AIDS, it is that some of its sufferers are doing relatively well. Many longtime survivors are forced to live on disability, too sick to return to their former lives. But some, like Mr. Vercher, are able to resume a normal existence.

"Dennis is unusual in that he leads a full, productive life," says his doctor, Brady Allen, who has amassed a large AIDS practice since 1982. He estimates that about 10 percent of his 500 HIV-positive patients have lived with AIDS for more than a decade.

"With 15 anti-viral medications available to us today, we're turning a lot of patients who would have been dead a long time ago into long-term survivors," says the Dallas internist. "In Dennis' case, we invent a new [drug] cocktail for him that will last a year or two. And then we design another one when that one no longer works."

Mr. Vercher takes a mix of 22 pills every day to stop the growth of the human immunodeficiency virus, in addition to an anticoagulant for phlebitis and a weekly steroid shot to prevent weight loss.

His longevity is testimony to how the epidemic has changed from the early years, when a diagnosis on a Monday might be followed by the patient's death that Friday.

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By the time Mr. Vercher went to work for the Dallas Voice in 1985, AIDS was sweeping the city's gay community, he says. His years of writing about the epidemic have afforded him a sobering ringside seat for the untimely deaths of hundreds of young gay men, as well as the activism of gay leaders who wanted a quicker government response to the health-care crisis.

"I thought the activism was fabulous," he says, "although I could never talk about it because of being a journalist. In the '80s, Dallas was looking the other way, and somebody had to say something to make a difference."

He covered the rowdy AIDS demonstrations at Dallas City Hall and the county Health Department. He remembers well the makeshift graveyard of white crosses that sprung up on a grassy lot on Lemmon Avenue, to remind passers-by of the rising death toll.

While Mr. Vercher would lose three close friends and four co-workers at the newspaper to the disease, he says it also was heartbreaking to watch the public deaths of so many AIDS activists.

"I remember Howie Daire's death and how there wasn't anything he could buy time with," he says of the Dallas psychotherapist who died in 1986 after working feverishly to alert the gay community to the threat of AIDS.

"We lost people like Bill Hunt [in 1993], who was a fighter and an activist, but also the wittiest human being you ever met," Mr. Vercher says. "We lost some wonderful, wonderful personalities from this community.

"It's so much more than just lost economics and unrealized potential."

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In the midst of covering the epidemic, Mr. Vercher was fighting for his own life. His sickest period lasted from September 1993 through September 1994, when a series of ailments landed him in the hospital for extended stays. He spent Christmas 1993 in Baylor Medical Center and later was forced to use a wheelchair for several months due to crippling phlebitis.

The ordeal was made bearable, he recalls, because of the support of his longtime partner, whom he declined to identify other than to say the man was not infected with HIV.

"Emotional support is as important as a good doctor-patient relationship," Mr. Vercher says of his partner. "I never had to question his support. He was very much my advocate when I was extremely ill."

Mr. Vercher's work ethic throughout his illness has been an inspiration to his colleagues, says Robert Moore, publisher of the Voice. "There are some people who focus on living with AIDS, and some people who focus on dying with AIDS. Dennis is the former."

Several times, Mr. Vercher's bosses have had to order him to go home because he seemed too sick to be at work. "Dennis is somewhat of a workaholic," Mr. Moore says. "Work is his therapy."

But even as Mr. Vercher survives, others close to the newspaper have not. Don Ritz, the paper's co-founder, died of AIDS in February. He was 47.

As he looks to his future, Mr. Vercher notes that he has no major goals other than to continue to live his life as fully as possible.

"I concentrate on my work, my home life and my friends," he says. "We all live our lives a day at a time, and then we die. It's true for all of us on this planet."