Here I am, in a country where my body would have me deported. It's an interesting feeling, for many reasons. My boyfriend is struggling at the moment, understandably, with the whole issue, it frightens him and it upsets him to admit it. I'm really at a loss for how to reassure him. We both know that risk is there, that we want what we cannot have. If I say he's right to be scared, then why am I now at the point where having "it" no longer terrifies me, but if I say don't worry am I belittling his fear and being insensitive?
It aches that I am here, where my day is his night, we cannot talk except in emails and overpriced text messages, and while I walk in sunlight, he curls alone in darkness. Being so far from home, I am someone else, I cannot speak of the life I have lived, I cannot speak of the plague I carry, and that silence makes me stronger somehow, that I cannot brood upon it here, that I cannot make it a constant nagging worry because any anxiety like that means nothing. I'm not having sex while I am here, I am not planning on bleeding or sharing needles and the nights in London where the sense of this poison is very real seem so many time zones away.
Here, where my body is illegal, I can be nobody and that's worryingly reassuring.
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Red Cross
I was in a Red Cross museum last weekend, where a woman kindly showed me around a series of exhibits aimed to showcase the courage of those involved in humanitarian efforts and the ongoing need for people to show such charity to help the world's needy. She showed me a white bus that was used to bring rescued people home from a concentration camp, talking about the horrors endured within until I could almost feel the road beneath the wheels or the stench of death inside the bus. It was deeply moving. We talked about wells, joked about the drought in London and then she showed me a tent used after the earthquake in Iran to provide shelter for those made homeless by the disaster. All very timely reminders of the need for us to provide help in emergency.
Then, the section on HIV and AIDS, saying that 39.4 million people worldwide are living with the virus, how many have died, breaking it down by region of the planet, then down to the country and the city I was standing in. It was a strange moment to see something like that in a museum, to know that they viewed it, HIV, me, as a humanitarian crisis. The attendant was talking to someone, but the guy stood near me obviously saw that the statistics were making me reflect on something and he started to say what a tragedy it was that so many people in Europe had the disease now. I said something vague about infection rates being skewed by the numbers of people who had effectively become pharmaceutical refugees from African countries where HIV is rife making diagnosis among heterosexuals seem higher than it might actually be for Europeans. while it remains a crisis for gay men.
The man shook his head sadly, saying that he'd thought infection rates among gay men should have almost totally disappeared by now, he never heard anything about help for gay people these days and surely gay men "should know better than to get themselves infected."
I guess we should. I couldn't bring myself to say, "I knew better and I managed it," but it was there in my throat, catching like a bolus of tears. It's amazing how fast it flips from being nothing, a complete non-issue, then suddenly it's a knot in my chest, I am those Africans, I am those needy children, those medical accidents. Except I'm not, because they're victims of HIV, I'm someone who doesn't deserve that charity because I knew better. It doesn't matter that I have an unassisted lifespan of ten years, it's all my own fault because I knew better.
There's an article in the Observer over the weekend saying that a group of patients who were infected by transfusion in the 70s and 80s are pushing for £750,000 compensation because the last payout was based on the assumption that they would die shortly. The payouts were upwards of £45,000 and yet the people who were "given tainted blood" say they now live in poverty and are unable to work or form relationships because of this. So, the medical system which saved their lives once and was sued for it is now to be sued again for saving their lives again.
Ingrates, victims like that do bring out an angry streak in me, I have to say. While I'm sure they're pushing out of personal gain, it perpetuates this sense that there's Good AIDS and Bad AIDS, that there's the poor, unwitting victims of AIDS - and the article talked in terms of AIDS instead of HIV, when AIDS almost never happens in Europe any more and only very rarely is the cause of anyone's death unless they aren't adherant to medication - blood transfusion victims, rape victims, the children of drug users, people from third world countries or from socially marginalised groups. All these are the victims of Good AIDS and people will endlessly fund charities for them.
The gays, though, well, we brought it upon ourselves. We get Bad AIDS because we know better.
It strikes me that HIV provides a very politically expedient route to vent racism and homophobia, that no-one wants African blood or gay blood from a blood bank, not for the risk of transmission because all the nice white heteronormative heterosexuals feel sorry for us and want us to be victims, but wouldn't want gay blood or dirty black blood, regardless of the HIV status of Africans or gay men. The safe sex message is essentially that you shouldn't worry too much about AIDS unless you're having sex with a man who has ever had sex with a man or an African. Otherwise, if it's part of a holy union and monogamous, you're laughing.
A convenient excuse for religiously motivated oppression, I say.
Then, the section on HIV and AIDS, saying that 39.4 million people worldwide are living with the virus, how many have died, breaking it down by region of the planet, then down to the country and the city I was standing in. It was a strange moment to see something like that in a museum, to know that they viewed it, HIV, me, as a humanitarian crisis. The attendant was talking to someone, but the guy stood near me obviously saw that the statistics were making me reflect on something and he started to say what a tragedy it was that so many people in Europe had the disease now. I said something vague about infection rates being skewed by the numbers of people who had effectively become pharmaceutical refugees from African countries where HIV is rife making diagnosis among heterosexuals seem higher than it might actually be for Europeans. while it remains a crisis for gay men.
The man shook his head sadly, saying that he'd thought infection rates among gay men should have almost totally disappeared by now, he never heard anything about help for gay people these days and surely gay men "should know better than to get themselves infected."
I guess we should. I couldn't bring myself to say, "I knew better and I managed it," but it was there in my throat, catching like a bolus of tears. It's amazing how fast it flips from being nothing, a complete non-issue, then suddenly it's a knot in my chest, I am those Africans, I am those needy children, those medical accidents. Except I'm not, because they're victims of HIV, I'm someone who doesn't deserve that charity because I knew better. It doesn't matter that I have an unassisted lifespan of ten years, it's all my own fault because I knew better.
There's an article in the Observer over the weekend saying that a group of patients who were infected by transfusion in the 70s and 80s are pushing for £750,000 compensation because the last payout was based on the assumption that they would die shortly. The payouts were upwards of £45,000 and yet the people who were "given tainted blood" say they now live in poverty and are unable to work or form relationships because of this. So, the medical system which saved their lives once and was sued for it is now to be sued again for saving their lives again.
Ingrates, victims like that do bring out an angry streak in me, I have to say. While I'm sure they're pushing out of personal gain, it perpetuates this sense that there's Good AIDS and Bad AIDS, that there's the poor, unwitting victims of AIDS - and the article talked in terms of AIDS instead of HIV, when AIDS almost never happens in Europe any more and only very rarely is the cause of anyone's death unless they aren't adherant to medication - blood transfusion victims, rape victims, the children of drug users, people from third world countries or from socially marginalised groups. All these are the victims of Good AIDS and people will endlessly fund charities for them.
The gays, though, well, we brought it upon ourselves. We get Bad AIDS because we know better.
It strikes me that HIV provides a very politically expedient route to vent racism and homophobia, that no-one wants African blood or gay blood from a blood bank, not for the risk of transmission because all the nice white heteronormative heterosexuals feel sorry for us and want us to be victims, but wouldn't want gay blood or dirty black blood, regardless of the HIV status of Africans or gay men. The safe sex message is essentially that you shouldn't worry too much about AIDS unless you're having sex with a man who has ever had sex with a man or an African. Otherwise, if it's part of a holy union and monogamous, you're laughing.
A convenient excuse for religiously motivated oppression, I say.
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Saturday, April 15, 2006
Gonna PEP You Up With My Love
Been a bit quiet the last couple of weeks, I know - sorry about that. I guess after the good result and the slight confusion about what it could mean and the ongoing struggle against trying to pretend I can be a CD4 Sleuth and work out who infected whom because that way madness lies. No, after the high CD4 count, I felt like such a weight was lifted from me, that thoughts of medical intervention, of anything else are all so very far off as to make worrying about the disease utterly risible. My partner and I went to the clinic and had a very breezy chat with a Health Advisor about what would or wouldn't present a risk were it to transpire that he tested negative or of a different strain if, God forbid, he was positive. It wasn't quite at the point of asking whether or not I could cut him and fuck the wound, but we were asking questions about how long the virus remains active outside of the body because, well, putting it bluntly, we like the stuff that carries the virus and want to check about things like if I cum first and then touch him, or finger him, how much risk does that pose (minimal; moderate, respectively). It was all very healthy and I think both of us felt very responsible for having been, had a lovely chat with the guy at the counter to book ourselves in for a full screen to double-check for any other lurgies that could be lurking (although we'd know by now, surely?) and then walked out, hand in hand, laughing at the stuff that happened.
So, when he went in to talk to a doctor about whether or not he needed PEP for having been inside me for a few seconds, we both felt pretty stupid. It was tense to relive those fifteen minutes of the test, albeit remotely from where I was, half-heartedly, working that day.
He's negative, as of last week, and the doctor recommended that he didn't start PEP for the very minor degree of risk to which we'd allowed him to be exposed. This is a good thing, not just for his seronegativity, but the scare it gave both of us to have to confront the possibility that a moment of reckless passion could have resulted in an entirely different scenario. There'd be no serosleuthing going on there. It would be me infecting him, and I'd find that hard to deal with.
It really is that whole, "You, me and HIV" threesome sometimes.
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Saturday, April 01, 2006
Interpretations
I said I wouldn't extrapolate from the results I received, from the 743, but I'm not the kind of man who can put an idea down once I've got a bee in my bonnet about something. Of course, the result was great news, I can't and won't deny that, but there's the temptation to look at it in terms of understanding how such a change could happen, that my CD4 count has doubled in the space of three months. I'd put it down to healthy living, giving up drugs, acupuncture and the like, but when my boyfriend and I went in to have the talk about which activities might or might not be advised between us, the health advisor said it might just be that I was diagnosed while I was still in the throes of seroconversion.
I don't know why, but that thought did knock me back a bit, I suppose because in my mind I'd put my infection date at February last year and thinking that it could have been far more recent than that threw my sense of how I could have caught it or from whom.
As I said before, and shall maintain, there's no merit in knowing the how, who or why of my infection. I am HIV+ and there's no-one to blame or be angry with for that, apart from possibly myself, but I don't know that I was any safer or less safe in my behaviour than anyone else would have been in the scenarios I found myself in over the last couple of years.
I'm sticking with the theory that it's healthy living that's made the difference, that a combination of stopping taking drugs, starting acupuncture, being all a-flutter with a new beau and having better sleeping patterns helps make everything a little healthier. The doctor who I saw on Thursday evening seemed to agree with this, although he had the head pharmacist in the room doing some check on the information he gives patients so he seemed to hold back a bit from saying outright that using stimulants like amphetamines over a protracted period is very immunosuppressant - or however you spell that - it's late and I've spent ages doing the redesign for this blog (hope you like it).
Still, there's no merit in knowing why these things have happened, if I'm not going to let this thing rule my life. Especially with a CD4 count as high as it was when I had my blood done. If those results stay the same or around the same region, then the only thing to fear is transmission, and I want to protect my boyfriend from anything, anything that could hurt him.
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