Sweet receives WSU honorary doctorate

by Sara Ritsch
Staff Writer

Dr. Donna Sweet, lifesaving HIV and AIDS physician, is currently receiving Wichita State’s first honorary doctorate since 1988 in a fall commencement ceremony at the university.

Sweet is a professor of internal medicine at the University of Kansas School of Medicine – Wichita and has been treating her HIV/AIDS patients for 35 years. She cares for about 1,300 patients with HIV or AIDS and another 3,000 patients without the disease.

In a release from the university, WSU President John Bardo said that Dr. Sweet has changed the world with her scholarship and her heart.

She has dedicated her life to the prevention, treatment and awareness of HIV/AIDS, and has since saved countless – immeasurable – lives.

Dave Quick has been Sweet’s patient for 24 years. In describing Dr. Sweet, he says, “She not only takes care of people, she dispenses love. She literally dispenses love to everybody – more than anybody, her patients.”

Quick has a serious heart condition, not HIV or AIDS. When he was referred to Sweet, though, it was because she was the best doctor in town – and although at the time she was solely treating HIV/AIDS patients, she did not turn him away.

“When I left Philadelphia to move back to Wichita, the doctor there told me I had five years to live or less – which means I should have been dead in 1991,” Quick laughs. “That’s when I met her.”

Quick attributes the majority of the reason that he is still alive to the compassionate treatment he has been given by Dr. Sweet. When they met, he was under doctor’s orders to stop his active lifestyle, such as bicycle racing and hiking, and to not even walk up stairs. But in his first appointment with Dr. Sweet, she asked him, “What do you want to do?”

“I told her, ‘I used to climb mountains. I want to climb again. I want to play racquetball, and I want to hike.’ Like I said, at the time I was warned not to walk up stairs. She said, ‘Okay, I know we can get you strong enough to do that.’ Within five years I had climbed four mountains over 13,000 feet tall.

“I was climbing with a student, a friend of mine, and after every mountain we would get to the top and he would say, ‘Thank god there weren’t any stairs!’” Dave bursts into jovial laughter – the kind of laughter you would expect from a much younger man.

“I’m 70 now, so I do none of that anymore. But considering I was supposed to die in 1991, I’m in pretty good shape!”

Quick says that if he has ever had an inkling of a problem, she has been there. “I don’t know how she does that,” he admits. “She’s a true healer.”

So, as we speak and for the first time since 1988, Dr. Donna Sweet is being given the honor of receiving a much earned and well overdue honorary doctorate.

And this woman truly deserves it.

The Gayly - 12/13/2015 @ 3:55 p.m. CST