Knowledge and discovery
We sat down to talk about living with HIV for over a decade and what it means for life
and the pursuit of happiness.
He had known many people affected by HIV, but rarely met anyone who
had succumbed to AIDS except for stories of people and the haunting
pictures that accompanied the dying days of the famous in the early days of AIDS.
His arrival in the UK allowed him to explore a nature he knew he had
from well before the age of 10, when he had his full sexual encounter with someone
6 years older.
Freedom for expression
In secondary school and later he found someone who shared a same sex inclination,
and they found places and time to fulfil their passions, a situation that can be
inhibited by the homophobia now being codified in the legal framework in
Nigeria.
Apart from the occasional threats of blackmail, there were few with
whom there was a sense of fulfilled sexual companionship, it was almost transactional.
The UK signalled freedom, the freedom to explore his sexuality without
fear, and that was soon realised in a number of trysts; some lasted weeks, others
lasted months until he found a soul mate that ushered in a relationship that lasted
seven years.
Testing for inconvenience
He took a few sexual risks and went for check-ups that sometimes presented
embarrassing results not helped by the kind of engagements and unsettling
discussions with sexual health workers;
this discouraged the prompt take-up of free services.
He took the HIV
test up to three times a year, but
he extracted an undertaking that they do not inform him of the results. He guessed
the outcomes presented no need for the clinic to contact him urgently for a follow-up.
In September 2002, he went in for a sexual health check-up and by that
time, he had decided he was ready for whatever the results were. By then, he was
almost certain that the result will be positive and was already working on how to
live life with such a prospect.
Knowledge and adjustment
The first result indicated a positive, but they took another test to
be sure and that returned a positive, he had become a person living with HIV, and
he adjusted his life to accommodate that reality by seeking out those with a similar
health situation.
Many years passed with almost a sense of invincibility bordering of
fatalism, much as he had a useful relationship, they both sought out multiple partners
and yet for all they liked to do, they were almost teetotal, never did drugs but
liked their sex along with the companionship, the travel and many other exciting
things partners did for fun.
His HIV positive partner had long been on anti-retroviral
(ARV) medication, but he paid no attention to what some others began to observe
as failing health, probably the virus ravaging his body, rampaging through his veins
and organs, untrammelled and unmanaged until 2009 when a rapid deterioration in
health presented a life-threatening condition.
You have AIDS
Towards the end of that year, he was close to becoming an unusual AIDS
statistic in Western Europe where medicine had already arrested the view of HIV
being a terminal and precipitous condition that rapidly brought the scythe of the
Grim Reaper to harvest another soul.
The intervention was late but just in time for medicine and medication
to delay the possibility of impending death due to a seriously weakened immune system.
He had dabbled with a reckless carelessness to life, but mercifully,
he won a new lease of life moving him out of the terrain of a person suffering AIDS
back to just being a person living with HIV.
Life living with HIV
Within 8 weeks of taking on first-line treatment, the HIV virus had
become undetectable in his bloodstream though it has taken much
longer for his immune system to recover and move him out of the danger zone of opportunistic
infections.
Now, four years down the line, he is much wiser and informed about
HIV/AIDS issues, he has considered getting involved in activism and advocacy for
the many with his kind of background who find it difficult to talk about sexuality
and status considering the stigma that follows revealing such a condition to family
and friends.
Know and act
I thought he had an interesting story to share about the need to know
your status and the greater need to engage promptly the sexual health services that
will provide better medical outcomes with timely intervention before HIV results in AIDS.
He has decided to start with sharing part of that long story of living
with HIV and AIDS over the last 11 years on World AIDS Day, 2013.
Thank you.
1 comment:
Thank you
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