“I didn’t even breathe until I walked out,” Curran says. “I walked in, and he was staring right at me, watching every move I made. I said, ‘I’m going to take out your IV,’ and he said ‘Okay.’ That was the only thing I said. I didn’t want to say anything else and have to breathe in.

At St. Vincent’s Hospital, a student nurse named Claudia Cozzi was assigned to a ward that housed as many as seven AIDS patients at a time. During one shift, another student accidentally stuck herself with a needle that had been used on one of the AIDS patients. Cozzi describes the moments that followed as “pandemonium.” The student was given a gamma-globulin shot, and then there was nothing to do but wait two years to see if she had contracted the illness.

Reassuring herself that no health-care worker had yet caught AIDS from a patient, Cozzi fetched ice packs for some and went to the cafeteria with special food orders for others. Often, she just stood by a bed and listened to a patient talk. Many spoke of their families. Others said they wished they had not been homosexual. Some refused to eat, and said they would rather kill themselves than continue to suffer. A few tried to deny that they were ill. They got out of bed and smoked cigarettes and wrote letters and made telephone calls until they were too weak to move.

Even with the odds of contracting AIDS from contaminated blood at less than one in a million, worried calls kept coming into the office.

“They get a daily weight check, and they just waste away,” Cozzi says. “They all know the outcome. That’s the trouble. They all know they’re going to die.”

One afternoon, Dr. Joyce Wallace, of the AIDS Foundation, sent Cozzi to the Federal Express office on Seventh Avenue with a padded envelope containing three biopsies. When the clerk saw the letters “AIDS” in the return address, he froze. He asked Cozzi to empty the envelope and she pulled out the three test tubes. “He said, ‘Oh my God, this is what everyone’s talking about,’ ” she remembers. “I said, ‘Relax, I’d be the first one to get it between the two of us.”

Sent to the main office on Eleventh Avenue, Cozzi presented her package to a supervisor. She remembers, “He said, ‘Oh, you’re the one who’s got AIDS.’ There were ten people in the room, and everybody shifted to the other side like I had leprosy.” The supervisor picked up a telephone and called the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. A moment later, he turned to Cozzi and said that the C.D.C. wondered how she thought the AIDS material should be marked.

“He wouldn’t even let me touch the phone,” Cozzi says. “I said, ‘Label it “Cancer.” ’ ”

Hanging up the phone, the supervisor said the C.D.C. had determined that the material could be shipped if it was labeled as a carcinogen. “He said, ‘We’ll put it in some extra boxes, just to be sure,’ ” Cozzi remembers. Even after she put the test tubes in four boxes, Federal Express apparently had some difficulty convincing its workers to move the AIDS material any farther. The test tubes did not reach their destination for four days.

At the Greater New York Blood Program, the symptoms of AIDS were added to the screening questionnaire. Those who passed were then asked to disqualify themselves if they were members of one of the primary risk groups. This form was then folded three times, stapled closed, and coded with the type and character of the blood. Later, a lab technician studied the form and any blood then deemed potentially hazardous was set aside for research. Still, even with all the precautions, even with the odds of contracting AIDS from contaminated blood at less than one in a million, worried calls kept coming into the office of the facility’s medical director, Dr. Robert L. Hirsch.

“We get calls from just about every walk of life,” Hirsch says. “You’ve got to waffle. There’s little you can tell them. There’s so little we know.”

Over at the Emergency Medical Service, officials began preparing a memorandum advising ambulance medics to wash down any equipment that came in contact with somebody who might have AIDS. There was also talk that the city was considering the purchase of “S-tubes” that would protect those who had to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. An emergency medical technician named Eileen Sullivan read a pamphlet on AIDS and began using disposable gloves when she encountered someone who was bleeding. If a call involved somebody she suspected was gay or a junkie, she threw out any of the cheaper equipment she had employed. She soaked everything with alcohol for the rest of the day.