In the summer of 2001, Shani Morgan was a few months pregnant and in prison, where she learned that she had HIV. She’d been sent from jail to Bragg Street Women’s Prison in Raleigh for better monitoring and medical treatment. What she remembers most about being treated by her UNC doctor, Becky White, MD, MPH, for HIV that summer is the look on White’s face after she researched the best course of antiretroviral treatment.
“She was looking through these books, it took about an hour,” Morgan remembers. “But then she had that look on her face like she’d found the holy grail.”
Nearly twenty years later, Morgan wrote to UNC hoping to find White (who was Dr. Stephenson then, before she married) to thank her for her care and to let her know how well she was doing. White, an associate professor of medicine in UNC’s Division of Infectious Diseases, is co-director of HIV Services for the North Carolina Department of Corrections.
“I think she would be proud to know that my son was born completely healthy due to the regimen that she prescribed in July 2001 that got me undetectable by that September,” Morgan wrote. “I was released that November and my son was born in January 2002. I’m extremely blessed that I will be celebrating 20 years of being undetectable in September. My son is an only child because I didn’t want to chance a second pregnancy or have more children than I could afford.”
Morgan’s note reached White in early January 2021, and White, associate professor of medicine in infectious diseases, arranged a Zoom call for the two to connect. When White met Morgan, “I was pretty young and not experienced with treating pregnant women,” she says. “I was just finishing my fellowship and had started a contract with the state prison system, treating men and women with HIV.” Doctors and nurses working in prisons needed to spend more time with HIV-positive women than men, White remembers. “Women had so many issues, a lot of it around trust.” The nurses she worked with then in the prisons were “incredibly organized. We had tremendous teamwork with the nurses, the pharmacy. Working with vulnerable populations, it takes a whole team of people.
Read more in the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases Newsroom.