Ryan White's dream was IU. Now, he lives on campus among the students.

Source: Indy Star

BLOOMINGTON — There was never a sliver of a doubt, never a question in Ryan White's mind where he wanted to go to college. If only he could live long enough, Indiana University was his dream.

As White fought AIDS in the 1980s, he was known around the world simply as Ryan, a fresh-faced teenage boy with doey brown eyes, stricken by a disease that most people, at the time, thought plagued only gay men and IV drug users.

White became the face of an entirely new population of people contracting AIDS and, for many, it was a face that terrified them. Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome caused a severe loss of the body's cellular immunity, greatly lowering the resistance to infection. People were catching the virus and dying months later.

In White's nearly six-year fight with AIDS, contracted through a tainted blood infusion he received as a hemophiliac, he battled discrimination and accusations, once saying that he was treated as a "teenage pariah."

White and his family were the the butt of jokes, target of vandals, and he was the victim of vicious rumors. "Sheer panic surrounds me," he told IndyStar at the time. 

All White wanted was to do the things normal teenagers did. Go to school. Eat in the cafeteria. Shake hands at church. And go to college.

White was an avid IU basketball fan, attending games with tickets given to him by singer John Mellencamp, who befriended White during his AIDS battle. IU basketball coach Bob Knight also became close with White and his family.

When Knight learned White's dream was to attend IU, he offered him a full scholarship, Jeanne White-Ginder, Ryan's mother, said before her son's death.

"We'll find a place for you on the team," Knight told White when he asked the coach what he could do, according to White-Ginder.

More: Ryan White's fight with AIDS 'He changed the world': Inside the life and death of Ryan White

When White died April 8, 1990, at the age of 18, a month before his high school graduation, IU became nothing more than a forgotten dream for his family.

Until Ryan White appeared with an IU backpack among the students on campus earlier this month, forever memorialized as a Hoosier.

Keep Going

Next to a huge, stone fireplace in the South Lounge of Indiana Memorial Union, as students study and gather, there is an 18-year-old kid in a jean jacket with an IU backpack, a kid whose dream was to go to IU.

White is memorialized in a permanent bronze sculpture, titled “Keep Going,” which was unveiled this month at IU.

The work was created by artist and senior lecturer of sculpture at the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture and Design, Melanie Cooper Pennington. She also did the casting of Alfred Kinsey that sits on IU’s campus. 

White's connection to IU has been years in the making, before and after his death.

In 1995, the Ryan White Center for Pediatric Infectious Diseases and Global Health at the IU School of Medicine was founded to honor the bravery of White, the first child to speak out about HIV infection in the United States.

"When White contracted the disease due to a blood transfusion, he gave a face to this feared and misunderstood disease," the school says. "His willingness to bring awareness of HIV to the public led to enhanced education and substantial progress in HIV research and care."

White was tiny, six days old, when his health battles began. He was diagnosed with severe hemophilia, a condition in which the ability of the blood to clot is critically reduced, causing extreme bleeding, even from a slight injury. 

Doctors prescribed the soon-to-be approved Factor VIII, a treatment for hemophilia that was a blood-clotting protein.

"We thought it was a miracle drug," White-Ginder said at the time. "Hemophiliacs used to be crippled by the time they were 9 or 11 years old, and Factor VIII seemed to keep him from having a lot of issues. But, what we didn’t know at the time, was that the drug we thought was saving (lives) was going to be the drug that later took their lives.”

When exactly Ryan received the contaminated dosage of Factor VIII is unknown, but that batch was later found to have infected 6,000 to 10,000 hemophiliacs in the United States with HIV.

Around his 13th birthday in 1984, Ryan started feeling sick and weak. His temperature spiked. He started vomiting blood. 

Inside Riley Hospital for Children on Dec. 17, 1984, Dr. Martin Kleiman told the Whites that Ryan had AIDS. His T-cell count was 25. The T-cell count of a healthy individual should be 500 to 1,200.

White-Ginder asked Kleiman how long her son had to live. Most AIDS patients, he told her, lived just months. White turned out to be not "most AIDS patients."

More than five years later, on the morning of April 8, 1990, Kleiman gave one final medical update on White to the news media.

"Ryan was critically ill, and he was responding to medications which we were using to support his systems, and he began to respond less and less," Kleiman said, "and finally (he) completely failed to respond and he expired."  

White wasn't the only child who had AIDS at the time. There were thousands. But few stood up and spoke out about their diagnosis.

That's what made White special, Kleiman always said, his bravery.

More Ryan White IU ties

In 1991, the Indiana University Dance Marathon was started by Jill Stewart Waibel, a doctor and close friend of White's, as a way to honor him.

Since then, the Indiana University Dance Marathon has grown to become the second largest student-run philanthropic organization in the United States and the country’s largest Children’s Miracle Network Dance Marathon.

Every year, more than 1,200 students work year-round to raise funds. The event has raised more than $20 million for the Ryan White Center for Pediatric Infectious Diseases and Global Health. For more information on the Dance Marathon, go to https://www.iudm.org/ryan.