Updating You

Not sure if this blog fell off everyone's radars this last month or two. When I changed over to blogger beta, it linked everything together through my gmail account and it became quite easy to get to my identity through this, which isn't something I was really prepared to risk, so I made the blog private for a little while. It's sorted now, so things should be ok.

That said, as much as no news is good news, good news is no news, so there's not been that much to say on here of late.

453

These results are starting to sound like buses. Another set of bloods back, another reassurance that nothing's happening yet that needs any kind of intervention. Given that there's plenty of friends of mine who have had it for a decade, or longer, who don't need medication, I wonder if perhaps I was a bit of a fool to think there was any point in thinking about the infection at all. Sure, it's a pain, and it's certainly a factor that damages relationships for me - not because of their fear of me infecting them, but more because of my own anxiety about it meaning I'm left overcompensating, hoping that they'll like me in spite of the virus.

Pozzing Peter to Pay Paul

Applied for one of those AmEx (Red) credit cards in a moment of whimsy last week, uncertain whether or not I would get it, only to receive a phone call a couple of days later telling me that not only do I get one, but it starts off with a £6,500 credit limit. When I said I wasn't expecting to use the card much, the woman explained to me that even a little bit going through the card would help pay for tablets for women to ensure that their children aren't going to be HIV+. Noble, I say, and I certainly don't disagree with it, but there's a funny way that giving money to other positive people in Africa brings up some odd dissonance in me. Putting aside the way that the money is focused on women and children, implying that men are the vectors of this disease and that charity generally is a double-edged sword, there's also the strange sense that it makes it an alien problem somehow.

Something like 46% of new HIV cases in the UK were among gay men. Apparently 30% of infections among gay men are undiagnosed, too, so the figures are higher. Gay Times this month ran an article about how many gay men there actually are in the UK as a percentage of the population. Their conclusion? Two. Two percent of the UK population are accounting for almost half of the new diagnoses of HIV in the UK. t's quite a scary proportion when you think about it and really does rather put paid to the general tendency to reinforce the message that HIV isn't just a gay plague. It certainly seems that way, doesn't it?

I'm wondering if I should try to take advantage of my own situation a little more. At the moment, I have only a tiny flat - I can't help but wonder if there's a way I could use my HIV status and the co-morbid depression to try to get a little more space to live in rather than the little pod I'm in right now. Perhaps I should pay a visit to a few housing associations in Lambeth, but I fear they're not going to be bending over backwards to help. Still, might be worth a try.

I'm also doing to start back at acupuncture and try to make myself head back to where I was, physically, nearer to the beginning of the year, getting regular acupuncture, not drinking or taking drugs, not smoking and exercising a lot. I've let slip on that and I think the numbers reflect that. Kind of falling into a pattern of not self-destruct, but perhaps a little bit of neglect - drinking, smoking, sleeping around. It's not something I'd find particularly appealing in another man and it's a distraction from career stuff.

But so is the drilling in the wall next to where I'm sitting at home. God, I want to have a better place to live.

Blaze Like Meteors

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


Just phoned through for my results, rather than wait for the email. I think that's the way I'm likely to be with this. I mean, calling in means you control when and where you get the news. By email, you could be at work or on holiday when it comes. Still, there's nothing for me to be concerned about yet, CD4 is 486, up a little on last time and Viral Load is 33081, so down on how it's been. It's the first time, though, that two sets of results have been similar. Let's hope that they remain that way. I wonder if I could try to boost my CD4 through careful living a little more, so my Christmas results won't be the nasty surprise they were last year when somehow I got a result of 85 which was either to do with them making a mistake, me having a rough time of it or indicative that I was diagnosed while seroconverting. No real way of knowing; it's only been a year.

Do I need to work hard to change the result next time? No, I don't think I want to. This virus has invaded my mind as much as it's invaded my body and I'm not really willing to allow it to invade my time any more than it must. I might start going back to acupuncture, more for aches and pains than for that, but I'm generally fit and well, and although the chest infection that knocks other people out for four or five days knocked me out for two weeks, I think I'm generally healthy.

One year. Nothing to say. Let's keep it that way.

Cruel

There's something particularly awful about waking up on the day after your father's 65th birthday party at which he's said he intends to be like the guy who was working on his 100th birthday and worrying that you might have pneumonia. I've been overheated again, enough to keep me awake at night, combined with a lot of stress factors I've had lately. Lost my boyfriend for a faraway land I'm not allowed to live in because of this fucking thing in my blood and losing my job because I didn't finish a qualification when things like that seemed suddenly less important than living all of a sudden. It's probably just a chest infection, but the irony is a cruel one. My father, fighting fit, dancing his heart out, while I fight fatigue and my t-shirt's patchy with sweat and I get home and fall deeply asleep, waking up damp and clammy with sweat.

There's no reason I shouldn't have a 65th birthday party, too, if everything works, if I start treatment when I need to and I stick to it all through the intervening 35 years, watching the people around me getting vaccinated against me, watching the world change while I'm totally reliant on the state, on drugs companies, for survival.

That my father could outlive me is something a son shouldn't have to consider.