“It was a bunker to them” – Christina Grube and the fate of the outcasts

“You are the first person in three years who dared to hug me,” an AIDS patient told Christina Grube in the mid-1990s. Words failed her.

“If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be here today,” another patient told her when she retired last December. Tears welled up in her eyes.

“I’ve always been someone who also supported patients emotionally while they were treated as lepers by society and in the hospital,” says Christina Grube in an interview with Watson.

She worked for 27 years as a nurse at the University Hospital Zurich (USZ) at the HIV consultation hour – in the “epidemic bunker”, as it used to be called.

The social stigma of illness accompanied Grube like a dark shadow on her career. In 1990 she already worked as a supervisor and later as head of rehab in the former addiction clinic in Frankental, now the «Suchtfachklinik Zürich».

“Drug addicts were judged as junkies everywhere at the time. No one was interested in the life stories that led them there,” says Grube. But it was important to her to see the whole person: “Some became addicted because their parents gave them drugs at age 10. Quite a few were victims of abuse and wanted to get high to suppress those experiences.”

It was a time of extremes: Grube was a close witness to the evacuation of the Platzspitz and Letten drug areas. And she helped catch the addicts. “At the time, however, we only had the option of cold turkey, which caused many to slip again,” says Grube. In the six years that she worked in Frankental, a man went into withdrawal nine times. The track was pulling more and more at its strength.

Grube regularly took the addicts to the university hospital, where many were treated for HIV or AIDS. “At the time it was in a barracks in the Spitalpark – people called it the epidemic bunker or AIDS house,” says Grube. But the place and the people had a very “familiar effect” on her. When the USZ announced a vacancy as a nurse for the HIV consultation, she immediately applied – and was accepted. But if she had known what to expect in the beginning, it probably never would have happened.

After all, in their first year at the USZ, 78 patients died of AIDS – mostly young men. “Many of them died all alone because their families had turned away. After all, they had the ‘gay epidemic’, as they disparagingly called AIDS at the time,’ says Grube. She also often had patients. For example, an 80-year-old grandmother who was HIV positive after a blood transfusion after surgery. Or a pregnant woman whose partner was ‘having fun elsewhere’ and infected both woman and child. “Sometimes the encounters were violent,” says Grube.

This “fate of the outcasts” was very close to her, so for a long time she did not know whether she could mentally cope with the job. In addition, social pressure has increased. Christina Grube experienced a whole new kind of rejection when she worked with HIV and AIDS patients. “People took a step back or shoved their chairs away from me when they found out what I do for a living. They had an irrational fear that I would infect them with HIV,” Grube recalls. What she found even worse, however, was the way people treated AIDS and HIV patients in the hospital.

“Especially people in the final stage of AIDS were treated as lepers by the staff,” Grube explains. “They only touched the sick with two pairs of gloves – even the physiotherapist for a massage.” She never felt that way, so she always treated patients the way she would want to be treated. “I never put on gloves – not even when taking blood. Because a lot has to go wrong if you prick yourself when taking blood.”

Grube was there not only medically, but also personally for her patients. It was not unusual for her to take them for a walk along the lake or have a cup of coffee with them after work so they had someone to talk to. “About 95 percent of all patients have my private cell phone number for emergencies and questions, which was never used,” she says.

Meanwhile, she had to hear from colleagues that she was mentally and physically more distant from the patients. “Many were afraid of getting infected in some way – because so little was known about the virus.” But Christina Grube stayed true to herself, even though she was often the only one who campaigned so emotionally for those affected, while everyone else kept their distance. The lone ranger of the outcasts.

The patients thanked her for that. The example of the pigs shows how much they valued Grube. “One of my first patients gave me a stuffed pig and wished me lots of pigs in the new job,” she says. Then it spread like wildfire.

She will remember a patient who brought a live pig to the HIV consultation at the USZ as a thank you. “Of course I couldn’t keep ‘Gertrud’, but from then on I regularly visited her on the farm,” says Grube. By the time she retired, all patients had made a total of 3,059 pig figures. She displayed all these in her office.

The hospital room full of pigs was known to the management. “Once the hospital director was on his way to see my boss. He walked past my office, then took a few steps back, looked slowly around the whole room and then left without saying a word,” says Grube with a laugh.

Her boss told her afterwards that the hospital director had asked him if they also practiced veterinary medicine. The 3059 pigs are now in their basement. «I am in contact with the pig museum in Stuttgart. I would be happy if they find a new home there,” she says.

Christina Grube retired in December. But she has no plans to give up her commitment to people affected by HIV and AIDS. She works three days a week at Checkpoint Zurich, a health center for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. There she is also responsible for the study prepared in Switzerland. This is a drug in tablet form and stands for “pre-exposure prophylaxis”.

“If you take it right, it protects HIV-negative people from contracting HIV,” Grube explains. She never imagined that there was now a drug that could prevent HIV infection. “What has happened in this area is extreme. In the past, you only did something once the virus was already in the body. And these drugs had strong, visible side effects,” she says. Nowadays you can’t look at people to see if you’re HIV positive – and cases of AIDS are very rare anyway.

But most still wouldn’t know the difference between the diseases. “AIDS is the result of an untreated HIV infection. If you are HIV positive, the virus attacks your immune system. This makes it susceptible to all kinds of pathogens, it makes you sick. That is the breeding ground for AIDS-defined illnesses,” says Grube. She has had to make that statement thousands of times during her career. Unfortunately also towards certain doctors.

“Last year, a general practitioner from the country called that he wanted to refer a patient with AIDS to the USZ. I ask him if the patient feels so bad. The doctor said no and said they did an AIDS test. I explained to him that there was no AIDS test, only an HIV test. It’s the same thing, he just said,” says Grube. But it’s not the same.

She is always amazed that even practicing doctors don’t know the difference between HIV and AIDS – those affected suffer. The said patient then came to the USZ and had to be informed first. “He thought he had AIDS and was terminally ill,” she says.

Christina Grube will therefore continue to inform others about the disease and the consequences for those affected. Because she is and remains the lone ranger of the outcasts.