Call it fate, if you will. All Robin Hardwicke knows is that when she left intensive care as a full-time practice for an upstart women's HIV program, it's where she was meant to be.

"This is the first time in my nursing career that I actually feel like I'm making a difference in someone's life," Hardwicke said.

That someone is women and, more recently, youths infected with HIV, the precursor of AIDS.

ICU patients for the most part were educated enough to take care of themselves. They got better and went home, Hardwicke said.

"The patient population I have now has several fights a day. They have so many other issues besides a life-threatening illness. My whole purpose is holistic care, so I'm not only taking care of that person with HIV, I'm taking care of their entire family, making sure they have food and shoes and clothes and everything," she said.

Hardwicke's passion for educating and managing HIV patients is contagious. She precepts one or two nurse practitioner students at Texas Woman's University and the University of Texas-Houston Health Science Center to the tune of 150 hours a semester, teaching them about obstetrics, well-woman care and HIV. None comes to her with the intention of specializing in HIV patients, but "When they leave me, every one of them is looking for a job in HIV," Hardwicke said.

It's a challenging specialty because of the stigma attached to the disease.

"Many of my patients have not disclosed their status to anyone and that includes people who live in their household. They have to hide everything and that makes it very difficult because they miss their medicine. HIV medicine is not like taking blood pressure medicine," she said. "If you cannot take 95 percent of it, then you become resistant to it and it stops working. And right now, we have only 17 or 19 medicines to choose from and that's not very much."

HIV is a chronic but manageable disease, just like diabetes or hypertension, with a prognosis for a long life if it's diagnosed early and patients take care of themselves, Hardwicke said. But she said she does not foresee a vaccine in her lifetime.

Hardwicke, 34, is pursuing a doctorate degree at Texas Woman's University. She also works two shifts a month as an emergency room nurse at Houston's Memorial Hermann Hospital at the request of the medical director. It satisfies the need for excitement and adrenaline that she missed after becoming a nurse practitioner in HIV care.

The only certainty in her plans for her Ph.D. is that she'll remain in HIV care, possibly in research. She said she's toyed with the idea that she may be able to do something for HIV patients in the political arena and has asked her husband, half-seriously, whether he'd consider a move to Atlanta if she joined the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hardwicke said she entered the doctorate program for personal reasons. "It was something I had to do. I am a nurse to the core and I have to take nursing as high as I can. And that's how I do it."