Antiseptic

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well
-Lazy Lazarus (Sylvia Plath)

Yes, I just quoted Plath, but trust me, things are very far from being that bad. Just thinking about writing after the comment on the last post about journalism. I don't think I should feel guilt for taking opportunities that are offered to me because of my status among other things, I just think it's a slight shift of thinking to go from the virus being something that threatens to destroy everything I have (which it never did, but I think we all have that fear somewhere) to being something that opens up doors for you.

So, with that bouyancy in mind, it was probably a good time to visit a friend of mine in hospital in Hampstead with Hep C (they think) and some other bizarre complications. He wasn't restricted to the ward, his condition having improved quite a bit, but still he was very obviously ill, his eyes were golden irises against whites of lemon. His skin was bronzed even though he's not been in the sun for weeks. The colour of Dettol, I'd guess. He'd lost a lot of weight since I last saw him, and he'd lost a lot of weight then, something like a quarter to a third of his former body weight gone in the last six months or so.

While obviously I'd known he's been ill, he made mention of being on the transplant list and how he was being moved over to long-term benefits, which I'd interpret as meaning that they're not expecting him to get any better in a hurry, which must be hard on anyone. My boyfriend came with me to meet him, but although the three of us were chatting, drinking fattening Starbucks drinks and went to the cinema as a group while I battled jetlag to stay chirpy and my friend battled fatigue to bring humour, I could see my boyfriend was processing a lot while we were all together. I am not particularly phased by people who are ill or disabled, although I was a bit squeamish when a friend sent me a photo of his broken wrist scar this morning, but I'm sure he was struck by it.

It wasn't easy for me, either, to see someone ill, knowing that in part I have the same thing within me. I'm hoping that I can avoid the same fate, although I can't rule out that possibility completely. I've never been so good at towing the line, so I don't know how adherant I'd be to medication, or how responsive to instructions about avoiding possible harm to myself. That said, after diagnosis, I've taken much better care of myself than I was doing beforehand, cutting out the recreationals and the parties and the orgiastic life, walk most of the journeys I make and generally manage my life a little more sensibly than I was doing before, so I can't say my prognosis for life is one of terrible decay and unstoppable doom or anything like that.

And hey, if I get ill, I get ill, it's hardly like I'm going to be kicking myself about it, just like I'm not wagging my finger at my friends who have been ill with this thing. That Good AIDS, Bad AIDS thing really hacks me off, I tell you that for nowt. Besides which I think I have BadGood or GoodBad AIDS because I could either have caught it while recklessly fucking around on drugs (BadAIDS) or from my ex (GoodAIDS) but it's moot. Sure as eggs is eggs, I've got HIV and there ain't a great deal I can be doing about that.

My friend might die. That happens. If you're deterministic enough to say that it's possible for actions to bring specific consequences, then you're deterministic enough to acknowledge that those actions were in themselves consequences, so coulda and shoulda can't really be applied with any sense of meaningful authority.

Barebacking is to HIV what a short dress is to rape?

Tags: Dying, Plath, HIV, AIDS, Boyfriends, Serodiscordance, Good AIDS, Bad AIDS, Hep C, Cross-infection, Determinism, Facing the future

Making a Living out of Dying

Strange position to find myself in at the moment, being offered work as a journalist for an HIV charity's magazine. I can't help but find myself wondering at whether or not this is a sensible thing for me to get involved with. Obviously, I want the journalistic experience, it's a matter close to my heart and I think I have useful things to say to people about the issues around HIV. However, I feel slightly odd about getting work off the back of my HIV status and could see how readily not the charity itself, but the general HIV third-sector industry could be somewhere that I could exploit the combination of my skill set and my status to make relatively rapid progress.

I've encountered a few people who are HIV+ as a career and I think it bears the same complextities as the people who are Professional Gays or working in and with whichever other minoritiy issue. The temptation to become immersed in it seems rife and I think I want to be careful to avoid that.

My Body, The Hand Grenade

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.

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.

Tags: HIV, AIDS, living with HIV, going gently, Red Cross, marginalisation, racism, homophobia, veiled bigotry, the mask of benevolence, good AIDS, bad AIDS, blood transfusions

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.

Tags: PEP, HIV, AIDS, Serodiscordance, Living with HIV, HIV testing, CD4 count, Health scares, Love