A dying father told his son off for wiping away a tear from his cheek without first putting on protective gloves, the Lindsay Tribunal heard.
The widowed father of two was fiercely independent despite having haemophilia, hepatitis C and the HIV virus, and was determined his children should not put themselves at risk in caring for him.
During his illnesses, he insisted on driving himself to hospital even though it meant a round trip of several hundred miles. With reluctance, he let his wife help him but she died suddenly several years before him.
William's father only told him two weeks before he died that he had the HIV virus. By then he was bedridden and gravely ill but had insisted on William remaining at work so that people would not be suspicious.
In his final days, William, who was 20, and his sister, lived in one room with their father to care for him.
"I got a chance to talk to my dad. I was crying and he was crying. I saw a tear roll down his cheek and I wiped it away and he shouted at me and said I couldn't do that without wearing gloves. It hurt. But he felt what he had was extremely contagious. He had done everything his whole life to protect us."
William was giving evidence as the tribunal continued its investigation into the infection of haemophiliacs with HIV and hepatitis C through contaminated blood products.
He said he called in a GP towards the end against his father's wishes but managed to fulfil his father's wish to avoid hospital.
"He knew he would be put into one of those black body bags and sealed up and shipped off. He just did not want to go out that way."
Another witness, Brigid (also a pseudonym), gave evidence that she would never be a grandmother because her daughters had resolved not to have children in case they were haemophiliac like their late father.
Brigid's husband was diagnosed with hepatitis C around 1990 but he kept it from her for some time so as not to upset her.
Rumours started that he had AIDS and his daughters were jeered at school. "They were called the AIDS carriers," said Brigid.
Christopher, another pseudonym, told the tribunal his son, now a young man, was diagnosed with haemophilia when he was three years old after he had a tooth out and bled for days. When he was seven, he needed more teeth out and was given a clotting agent but six months later he developed jaundice so severe that he "turned mahogany".
Christopher was very critical of the way he found out. His son was screened for the virus by the Blood Transfusion Service Board and the results came in "an ordinary brown windowed envelope dropped in our door".
"The manner of the transmission of this information was callous to the extreme," he said.