A Friend's Result

There's a friend of mine who has been enormously, enormously supportive of me through the whole process of having a positive diagnosis who wanted to test, not having tested for a very long time, so, of course, I didn't think twice about offering to go with him to the clinic. It has, however, been a really, really interesting thought process for me because the friend in question is someone to whom I feel immensely connected, so rather than just being a matter of holding his hand in the waiting room and making him laugh, it's sparked off some thoughts that I hadn't expected.

He came to stay with me the night before the test and it was heart-wrenching to see the fear and uncertainty he was experiencing, not at the horrific prospect of a positive result, but at the thought of the period of adjustment, the transition to becoming, in his words, "One of them." That was something that has been on my mind for a while, the sense that there should be some feeling of discordance between me and people who do not share my serostatus, but also that I should have some sense of kinship with other people who have the virus, as though the thing in our blood and our brains carries some kind of family tree which becomes evident in our lifestyles, our thinking, our relationships. I don't like that thought at all.

I found myself saying to him, "If you are one of us..." which really made my head spin and perhaps was unnecessary to remind him that the thing he was so anxious about was the thing that I live with now and largely forget about (much as the clinic themselves forget to send me my results by email - STILL, but never mind) but I do understand totally his anxiety about the period of transition. Not in terms of seroconversion, the sweating at night, the weight loss, the symptoms of primary infection, but in terms of the knowledge that this thing is always hanging over you like a shadow. At least, that's how he was seeing it, that it's a spectre, it's something to always bear in mind, to think about disclosure, to think about the prospect of discrimination and the state's involvement in your life after a positive diagnosis.

It's been good to be reminded of the significance of the journey I have been on for the last few months, how far I've come from the tears and horror of the initial revelation to the kind of casual nonchalence there is about it now.

I'm not going to talk about the test itself, that's his business to talk about, not mine, but I will remember the assurance I felt that I was telling the truth when I sent him a SMS message saying, "You're in the other room getting your results right now, so I know you won't read this until later, but whatever the result, you'll always be my friend."

It's true. He has blue eyes, I have brown eyes. There's no sense of disassociation because of it and if his eyes became brown, I'd feel no deeper sense of kinship than I felt anyway. It is significant, but it doesn't matter, and I guess there's my lesson that I've learned from this.

It may be the end of the world, but some things are far more important.