I’m writing this post on December 1, 2024: World AIDS Day, and about 25 years or so since contracting HIV. I don’t know exactly when that happened. My doctor informed me of the situation on March 12, 2001, a week after I went in for a routine physical made possible by having a full-time job with health insurance for the first time in a few years. The initial battery of tests suggest I had seroconverted perhaps a year or two before that.
I also don’t know how it happened, specifically. Inferring from the timeline, some contextual cues, and my own recollection of the times when I let my guard down, I can at least guess with some accuracy who the vector of transmission had been.
I am placing this entry, backdated to the afternoon when I found out, as a marker of that moment. I posted and documented my way through the earliest days of me grappling with my situation, but I now feel like most of these entries are better left hidden in my archives, for my own reference.
But I’d simply like to note that I have been living with HIV for about 25 years, and I am extremely healthy. I have been medicated for all that time, and I have never once had any kind of opportunistic infection. When I have had any medical complications in. my life, they have been entirely unrelated to my HIV status, a fact that has surprised me each time.
I can place this backdated post on my site, but I wish that I could send it back in time. I wish I could start telling myself in 2001 that there would not be som much reason to worry. I wish I could say that I would on the whole go on to become healthier than I had been earlier in my life, and that modern medicine would ensure that my viral load would stay undetectable for decades. I wish I could tell myself that that the scientific and medical consensus would one day be that remaining undetectable pretty much guarantees that I cannot pass HIV to another. I would be able to avoid years of feeling radioactive. I would not life for years with the deeply held, barely acknowledged thought that I probably wouldn’t live past 40.
It is 2024, and I 54 years old and healthy, relatively successful, and overall quite happy. I take my medication every day, but I no longer think about the implications of that each time. It’s just part of what I do, as it has been for decades — decades I wish I could have known that I would have.
