{"id":77254,"date":"2001-03-12T10:24:00","date_gmt":"2001-03-12T18:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/?p=77254"},"modified":"2024-12-01T10:45:05","modified_gmt":"2024-12-01T18:45:05","slug":"backdated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2001\/03\/12\/backdated\/","title":{"rendered":"Backdated"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019m writing this post<\/strong> on December 1, 2024: World AIDS Day, and about 25 years or so since contracting HIV. I don\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also don\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I\u2019d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t live past 40.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s just part of what I do, as it has been for decades \u2014 decades I wish I could have known that I would have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019m writing this post on December 1, 2024: World AIDS Day, and about 25 years or so since contracting HIV. I don\u2019t 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 … Continue reading “Backdated”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ultrapositive"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77254"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77256,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77254\/revisions\/77256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}