CD4 Count: 85

I should have been really traumatised, but I don't think I am. Yesterday, I was out shopping with my sister and trying on some very bad things she thought it would be funny to dress me up in, got out into the street and had a voicemail asking me to phone the results line of the clinic when they opened because my results were, he said, "Awkward".

Trying on shorts in Nike Town until they started playing music about how good it is to shoot gay people didn't really serve to distract me from the nagging thought that I really should be concerned about this, knowing that it means a result below 200, so she and I went for vodka and orange (yin and yang in action there) in Soho with a friend of mine. Had a wonderful evening, got home happy and went to bed with a smile on my face, completely forgetting I'd thought perhaps it would be a good idea to take Valium to help me sleep.

Woke up coughing through the night, convinced myself I had pneumonia, had some Cherry Tunes, then convinced myself I had TB because the phlegm I coughed up was red. Laughed at myself a little bit, then fell back to sleep.

Got up this morning a little too early, decided to make a compliation CD rather than take Valium, kept making myself wonder if I was overcompensating by sticking Nine Inch Nails in the middle of camp songs to send in return for a compilation CD I received before Christmas.

Phoned the results line just after nine. My CD4 Count was 85 and my Viral Load about 57,000, which just makes very little sense. I was in the clinic by ten to have the blood test redone. Had a funny chat with the nurse about how veins sometimes jump out of the way when the needle goes in, which mine did, so we had this sort of strange moment where I'm trying to wiggle my arm so some blood actually came out.

Left me giggling in the waiting room until my doctor came through. Oddly enough, despite having phoned a friend of mine on the way to the clinic for reassurance about drugs and stuff and sent a couple of worried text messages, by the time I went in to see him, I didn't feel worried at all. He said that it was a very odd result, not just for the low CD4 count, but also that my viral load was lower than the last result and that the CD4 percentage was 51% of all my T-helper cells. I got a little lesson in why HIV jargon stopped talking about T-cells and moved to CD4 counts, which was interesting, but perhaps not the focal point of our discussion.

It may well be an oddity, but I suspect my CD4 count is low anyway, just by extrapolation from what it was before. I said as much to the doctor and said I was surprised I hadn't spent the previous evening worrying about the phone call and convincing myself I was about to die. He patted my big blue file and said, "You know, with this, you're going to live forever?"

It was good to hear it. He went on to say that about five times in a row, just in different ways, so suddenly the thought that the virus had been playing Hungry Hungry Hippos with my immune system didn't seem such a threat any more. I do not have any opportunistic infections, I don't have any AIDS-defining illnesses and if I can run up the stairs to the clinic without getting short of breath after walking there then I'm guessing I'm in reasonably good health and my panic about my tonsils and thus thinking I am in the last stages of every archaic and slightly quaint illness in the world isn't really likely to be based on anything but slightly indulgent hypotheses.

Nevertheless, I'm on the same antibiotics I used to have as a kid, but this time they're not banana flavoured, sadly. I'm to take them until I hear back about my results next Thursday, then either I stop taking them or I come in to the clinic for a big talk about combination therapy. It's a bit soon, but I always did rush into things.