My Life After Now

13

It’s a Hard-Knock Life




Here’s the entirety of what I knew about HIV:

1. It’s the virus that causes AIDS.

2. It’s communicable through unprotected sex and needle sharing.

3. It’s incurable.

It wasn’t much; I needed to know more. So, one night that weekend, after everyone else had gone to bed, I went online. It only took a few quick keystrokes to discover that when it came to the subject of HIV and AIDS, the Internet was a bottomless well of overwhelmingly depressing statistics. But I just couldn’t look away. As the data piled up, my outlook became increasingly pessimistic. But at least I was beginning to get answers to some of my questions.

I learned that, apart from sex and IV drug use, the two main routes of HIV contraction are breast milk and perinatal transmission—which means a mother passing it onto her baby. So, no, I would never be able to give birth to my own child.

I learned that, for most people, HIV progresses to AIDS within ten years. For some, it takes longer, and for some, it happens much sooner. So, yes, at some point, most likely before I turned thirty, I would get AIDS.

I learned that AIDS killed over twenty-five million people between 1981 and 2006, and several more million since then. So, yes, I was going to die. And not in the, “Oh, everyone dies someday, but only after they’ve lived an extra-long life and had kids and grandkids and great-grandkids” way. I was going to die in the far-too-young, oh-so-tragic way.

I pressed on and learned what, exactly, that death would look like. It was ironic—I’d sung along to the Rent song “Will I?” about a thousand times without ever really thinking about the meaning behind the words. But now, for the first time, I understood why the characters were asking if they would lose their dignity. It was because that’s what AIDS does to its victims. There would be lesions and loss of bowel control and high fevers. But those are just super-fun bonuses of the syndrome—they wouldn’t kill me. There was no knowing what would finally take me out in the end. AIDS makes your immune system basically useless, so that you’re susceptible to all kinds of illnesses and unable to fight them off. So it could be cancer or liver disease or even pneumonia…but whatever it was, it was guaranteed to be undignified.

But as hard as these facts were hitting home, they were still just words. I needed to see it, in living color. So, in a morbid fit of self-sabotaging curiosity, I did an image search. In less than a second, my computer screen was filled with dozens of the most awful photographs I had ever seen. Horrifyingly thin, failing bodies hooked up to oxygen machines. Skin covered in lesions so bad it looked like it was rotting. The helpless, pleading faces of African children staring straight into my soul.

A shiver rolled over me, and I grabbed my trash can just in time for it to catch a surge of vomit. It was as if my body was trying to rid itself of what it had just seen. As if it was trying to evict the sickness that was taking up residence inside.

But I couldn’t unsee what I’d seen—even when I closed my eyes the images were still there.

And I couldn’t get rid of the virus. If there was anything my little Internet excursion had reinforced in my brain, it was that.

As quickly as I could manage, I erased my browsing history. Then I turned off my lights and dove under my covers and vowed never to allow myself to be tempted into researching this disease ever again.