En Hiver

A friend of mine called me an HIVer last night. I'm either part of a hive or I'm a French Winter. I'll take the latter, please. I wonder what other terms I can find to talk about pozzies, plague dogs or whatever "us" people united by a formerly terminal illness.

Got my CD4 count back, it's rocketed up to 435 and my Viral Load is 58,000, so the pharmaceutical industry can kiss £15k per annum goodbye for a little while yet. Was interesting thinking that perhaps I should go on the drugs so I felt like I was "doing something" about the virus, but actually, the 85 count and my ridiculous good health and humour throughout made me think perhaps I should stop worrying about any of it and just see the funny side of it all, the vaguely risible panic over numbers, rather than looking at my overall health, which is superlative.

I think another factor has to be my disclosure to my mother and my sister. Makes me wonder if I could get an extra 200-300 points for telling my dad, too, then I'm sure all would be well in the world once more. I really need to arrange that.

It's funny how much the CD4 count mirrors your own mental state - looking at the results (apart from the blip result of 85) you can see the progression of my acceptance of my new status - initial ignorance, then sinking with angst and now coming back up again on the other side of getting used to it, like some perverse mood chart.

Ironically, I got through a load of NAM guides about medication this morning from THT, which I won't really need to look at for a little while yet, I'm hoping. I also asked them for some guidance booklets to send to my mother so she's got some materials about the virus and what it means for someone to be infected (and infectious) these days. The THT helpline have actually been very good both times I've called them, friendly, concerned enough to ask if I'm okay, then nice enough to back off when I say I'm okay and get on with the business of sending me lots of information.

I also called the Gateway Clinic which offers Chinese medicine, acupuncture and such like, and if you're positive, you bypass the waiting list, so I self-referred there and will be heading along there in a couple of weeks for a consultation meeting with them to see what kind of things they might be able to do for me. Also phoned The Lighthouse but they sounded a bit more focused on benefits advice and such like, which I'm not sure I really see the need for when there surely must be very few HIV+ people who are actually incapacitated by the illness, but still, maybe I'll stick my nose in there one day just to see what's on offer. The woman on the phone said something about helping people get into college and such like. I didn't realise being HIV+ took away your literacy, so apologies now if my blog makes less sense as it goes on.

The Compass Centre that THT recommended to me offers activity breaks out of London, but only for African people with HIV. I want to know who will give me free holidays for being a minority group in the area I'm living in (it's predominantly black and portuguese round here).

So, if I can't get free drugs that will cripple the economy if everyone gets infected, then I could do with some other free stuff instead, just because it might be funny. I'm already signed up so Elton John pays for me to get Positive Nation sent through to me.

Oh, and I'd really rather THT didn't send you stuff stamped with lots of Private And Confidential marks all over it, they might as well send it with a stamp saying, "The Recipient Of This Information Is Hiding Something!" I live alone, they can put, "You Have AIDS" on it if they want.

I don't think I'll be asking for The Food Chain to deliver my meals. They'd probably send me to MacDonalds instead.