Jonathan Swain

The Miraculous Life of Jonathan Swain

By Keith Morrison, Correspondent, NBC News
July 7, 2006

He arrived in this world six weeks premature, on March 19, 1983 and he wasn’t destined to stay for very long. They named him Jonathan. Jonathan Swain.

No one knew then, no one had a clue, that such a little bundle would produce such an amazing, remarkable story; begun in disaster, buffeted by betrayals, and pushed to a conclusion which any fool would tell you must surely be impossible. All they knew then was that the little bundle was in very big trouble.

Jon’s mom, Sheila Swain, remembers how her son needed several blood transfusions to keep his tiny 4-lbs. body going, and how, even when he finally went home, he was far from healthy. For two years doctors didn’t have an answer. Finally, after a bout with pneumonia that almost killed Jon, a specialist ordered a series of painful invasive biopsies. And then in June 1985, a couple of months after Jon turned 2 years old, came that phone call from the doctor.

The doctor told Sheila that Jonathan had AIDS. One of the blood transfusions he received when he was just a couple of days old contained blood tainted with HIV. Jonathan became the first child in Colorado, one of the first in the U.S. to contract the disease, And this is the mid-‘80s, medical research into AIDS was in its infancy, treatments were virtually non-existent. In 1985, for Jonathan Swain having AIDS meant only one thing: death.

Part 1 continued: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13756759/

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Excerpts from Part 2

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In March 1989, Jon Swain turned 6 years old. An event so unlikely, so unexpected, that his party became a media event. And no one doubted that much of the credit for that—and for Jonathan’s survival this long, was due his mother, Sheila.

For a long time, little Jon had been unaware of just how much had changed in his mom’s life. He didn’t see the gun his mom took out of her drawer just weeks after his 6th birthday; didn’t hear the gunshot that sent a bullet straight into Sheila’s stomach. But he returned home with his brother Josh in time to see the emergency ambulance, horrified to learn his cherished mom might be dead.

Sheila was lucky. The bullet didn’t hit any vital organs. She told the local news media two weeks later, it was the enormous pressure of caring for Jon that led her to contemplate suicide but that the shooting was an accident. But at the time of the shooting, dealing with her son’s disease, wasn’t Sheila’s only struggle. A closer look would have revealed the tell-tale signs—the haggard figure, the pockmarked face - a radical change from the strong and pretty woman facing the cameras just a year before.

Sheila Swain had an awful secret. And it was a secret that would threaten to destroy not only her, but the son she so desperately wanted to keep alive. One line of cocaine very soon had become a $200 dollar a day crack habit.

So, even as she took Jon to the National Institutes of health in Washington for an experimental drug treatment which might help him survive a bit longer, she herself was going down fast. Life became erratic, unpredictable. They moved when Jon was 7 -- from Colorado to Iowa. And her first stop was a nearby crack house. If anyone on the outside had known the real story, they would have had to marvel just how did her sick son survive the next year...and the next...and the next.

Part 2 continued: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13756759/page/2/

(To be continued)