A Family’s AIDS Tragedy: ‘It Can Happen to You’

CORONADO —  Before Navy Lt. John Shaulis learned that his wife and son were infected, he believed that only homosexuals contracted the deadly disease AIDS--and that they deserved it.

“I was wrong,” said Shaulis, 37. “It is torture--slow death. No one should suffer as my wife suffered. No one.”

Shaulis, a Navy pilot, buried his wife, Linda, last week, three years after the death of the couple’s 14-month-old son, August. Both were victims of AIDS.

Doctors believe that Linda Shaulis became infected during a sexual encounter years ago, in her college days. Unwittingly, she passed the virus along to her baby.

At her death, 32-year-old Linda Shaulis weighed 60 pounds and had gone blind.

“We are the perfect example of middle America,” said Shaulis, who joined the Navy nine years ago. “If it happened to us, it can happen to you.”

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome was first recognized as a disease 10 years ago this week by physicians with the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control.

Early in the AIDS epidemic, the disease was restricted largely to the homosexual community. But over the years, it has increasingly spilled into mainstream America. Linda Shaulis belonged to a small but growing number of women who contracted the virus through heterosexual activity.

As of April 30, there have been 174,893 AIDS cases nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Of those, 17,200 involve adult women, a third of whom contracted the virus that leads to the disease through heterosexual activity, health officials say.

Not everyone who has intercourse with an infected partner will be infected, experts say. In that way, Shaulis was lucky. He has not tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

At his wife’s request, Shaulis kept her diagnosis a secret from most of his colleagues. Linda Shaulis also did not want her family to know. At her burial, all but one brother and sister believed that Linda died of cancer.

John Shaulis came to The Times to discuss his wife’s death, hoping it might prevent further spread of the disease.

“I am 37, I’ve buried my wife, my son and I’ve got a headstone with my name--that’s a little too early,” Shaulis said. “This doesn’t just happen to drug users or inner-city people. People think this doesn’t happen in Coronado. But it does.”

One year before her death, Linda Shaulis, a kindergarten teacher who grew up on a farm in a small Texas town, began keeping a diary. Originally, she bought the diary to write about John’s life and hers, how they met, their hopes for the future.

Instead, she wrote about her death.

May 20, ’90

It’s the day after the second anniversary of August’s death. I prayed for him last night. . . . It’s hard to believe he would have been 3 years old. At times I wonder what he would look like, his mannerisms, etc. John would love to take August everywhere with him. The gym, biking, jogging, playground, everywhere.

June 27, ’90

I don’t know how to say or write down what needs to be said. Maybe I’m too scared to write the words. Maybe I’m afraid for anyone to know what really is happening to me. I really don’t know the answers. The truth is I’m slowly dying from AIDS. Yes, everyone is dying but I know my death is within years not decades.

People are always asking how I feel about having AIDS or they seem so surprised at my attitude or coping process. What choice do I have? I have to accept the fact and live with it.

. . . I do know I am not ready to leave this earth. I also know when it is time I will be very scared. . . .

John is always asking me what I want out of life . . . my goals. I always say I don’t know. The only thing I do know is I wanted a happy marriage, children. . . . I still have my marriage to love and enjoy but my chances of having (more) children are gone.

I was blessed with August for a short time. I feel robbed by losing him, but I am the one to blame for his death. He died because of my foolish actions . . . . I only hope he can forgive me. I hope John can forgive me. Because of me, John lost his son. As long as I am alive, John will never be a father, he will not have a child. I hope someday he will be given a second wife and have children. I know it pains him not to be sharing his life with offspring. A child would be the apple of his eye. He would not let anything ever hurt his child.

. . . I don’t feel anything, almost numb! I don’t feel hate towards the person who infected me. I’m not totally sure who it was. I don’t even know if he is still alive. What good does it do to wonder? The damage has already been done.

Linda Shaulis met the lanky pilot John Shaulis at church. He sang in the choir and she attended services every Sunday. When he proposed, she didn’t hesitate and the two married on Dec. 22, 1984.

“The best thing that has ever happened to me is meeting John Shaulis,” she wrote in her diary.

When Linda Shaulis gave birth March 21, 1987, it seemed to the young couple that they had started to live their dream. More than anything, Linda wanted children. She wanted to take them to the zoo, out on picnics, go off on kite-flying and fishing expeditions.

For the first six months of his life, August Bradley Shaulis seemed to be a blissfully happy baby. He scarcely ever cried.

“It was just right--another step in the right direction of what the perfect life would be. If there is a perfect baby, he seemed to be that,” John Shaulis recalled. “Him being a boy, it was a chance to carry on the family name. I was proud, so proud.”

But John and Linda soon realized that August had begun to lose weight, that he needed smaller--rather than larger--diapers. Something was very wrong.

For several months, doctors were baffled. Finally, one afternoon three doctors walked into the hospital room where Linda and John Shaulis sat with their son. As they sat down, John Shaulis quipped: “Either you are awfully tired or you have bad news.”

In March, 1988, August Shaulis tested positive for HIV. Several days later, Linda Shaulis learned that she, too, was infected.

“It was like the bottom dropped out of the elevator,” John Shaulis remembered. “There went our hopes, our dreams because nobody beats it. It’s just a matter of how long you survive.”

Weeks later, August died. Within months, Linda Shaulis would be dying too.

Oct. 11, ’90

I cried today. I cried as I stood in a bathtub of cold water trying to get my fever down. Even the faucet wouldn’t give me a break.

I prayed to God. I told him he can take me when he is ready. I will be ready but scared to go. My fever hit 105 degrees.

. . . I am so tired of this illness. It has put so much stress on John and myself. I pain. I feel every day will be less painful than the next day. I don’t want pain. I want it, my life, to end. I don’t want to be tubed up, bugged up or doped up. Once I get to the stage where I know I will only get worse, that’s when I want to stop everything.

I think of my funeral. I want to plan it completely. It’s almost like preparing one of our trips, all the planning from start to finish.

Seven months after this diary entry, Linda Lee Shaulis died in her Coronado home.

“You see a picture of a husband, wife and child. One year later, it’s just husband and wife. . . . Later, it’s just husband,” said Karen Lange, a 26-year-old neighbor who visited Linda Shaulis several times a week during her illness.

Linda Shaulis had been angry--angry that she had not been tested for AIDS before she married, before she got pregnant. Eventually, that anger gave way to exhaustion.

In recent weeks, life had become an ordeal. Blind and weak, she stumbled into furniture in her two-bedroom stucco house. Sipping water tired her. Chewing one M&M; took several minutes.

John Shaulis--an aircraft division officer who supervises 70 people at North Island Naval Air Station--kept flying until the day before Linda’s death. It was his only release. He learned how to administer injections, adjust the blankets and buoy his wife’s moods. But he knew she had pneumonia and was dying.

On May 21, John Shaulis gave his wife some cough syrup at 1:30 a.m. She squeezed his hand. Her breathing had become labored and raspy. He fell asleep with one hand on her stomach.

When John Shaulis awoke at 4:15 a.m., he realized that his hand was no longer rising and falling with her breathing. Linda Shaulis--her eyes and mouth open--was completely still.