Becoming HIV Plus!

Just been looking back over the posts I've made to this journal and it's surprising how much my thinking has changed in so few little notes. The lost despair in face of the advice given by the doctors, the confusion. To me, it all adds up to something that my best friend told me when he had his test.

The hard part isn't living with HIV, but adapting to it.

It's true, being diagnosed HIV+ thrusts you, against your will, into a whirlwind of identity politics of which you were only ever peripherally aware in the past. Sure, I had friends who were positive, but never seen someone go through the process of becoming an HIV+ person. I suppose in some ways it's a similar experience to coming out, in as much as you find something out about yourself, then you have to adapt to how people view other people who do or want or have the same thing as you and also how you relate to other people who seem to be in the same position as you.

I'm not going to pretend the medical stuff isn't easy to get your head around, but there's a time of trying to learn how to trust what it is you're being told by doctors and health advisors that it really isn't all that scary in the end, that the drugs and the intervention they have now mean that it's really only a chronic condition to be monitored, rather than a terminal illness to be feared and avoided at all costs. That takes a little while to sink in, when everything you'd heard in the past was that to become HIV+ was such a bad thing you should go to any lengths to stay negative.

It's the transition that is the hard thing.

Now, I may have had few enough CD4 cells at the last count that I could give them all cute names, like a friend of mine suggested, but I think I'll just see how tha comes out next time. If it jumps up past 200 again I'm not playing that game. I'd call them all the same name anyway. Mine.

The biggest shift is in the thinking, as I said, the identity politics into which you're thrust. Suddenly you're in yet another minority group, you've got another flag to wave, another label to add to your CV or your gaydar profile, another reason to feel that life owes you. To be fair, though, I can sort of understand why people who aren't infected find it hard to get the experience of being HIV+ when all the promotional material tells you it is such a bad thing, then when you're HIV+, you're given a whole other literature that tells you it ain't so bad after all.

Prejudice is going to be the ongoing battle that will bug me more than the uncertainties about health. The sense that there's an increased amount of legislation pushing for HIV+ people to always disclose their status to any sexual partner, irrespective of what risks they take together, that people still don't know how safe it is to be near to you, that they feel they should tiptoe around you emotionally rather than just say what's on their mind. It could all get rather annoying.

Just as annoying, though, can be the flipside, the temptation to end up in some kind of AIDS ghetto, hanging out with other HIV+ people all the time and doing the whole HIV thing to death (excuse the pun).