My friend Ann is a retired infectious disease specialist who spent most of her career treating AIDS patients at a Veterans Hospital. Ann’s career began almost a decade before the antiretroviral drug AZT was developed to treat the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in AIDS patients. And so she did her best to keep her patients comfortable despite their poor prognoses, painful symptoms, and the trail of sorrow they left behind. One day, I asked her how she’d coped with the suffering and loss of life that filled her daily roster.