I was diagnosed with HIV in Summer 1997. Although as a gay man it was not really that unexpected, it was still a shock. Looking back now on all those years, in many ways those were the times my life took off. After some time licking my wounds I started to think that if I was going to die then I should do something with my life before it was over.
So the transformation began. I was in the local newsagent and saw a magazine with a CDRom on the cover with the headline “Build Your Own Web Site”. I bought the magazine and the rest as they say was history.
I have now built probably hundreds of web sites, some never seeing the light of day some have now disappeared into the ether, never to be resurrected, some really, really bad, some I am quite proud of.
One led me into a community activist treatment information project called ATP and from there to i-Base, where I stayed for ten years as their IT Manager. During those ten years I saw so many changes.
Treatments for HIV got better at keeping the virus suppressed, the pills were easier to take with less side effects. How I remember my first treatment regimen. From me sitting with the nurse saying “Blah, blah, blah” about this drug or that drug, and me thinking “you know best, just keep me alive and stop talking at me”; to sitting on the loo with the worst diarrhoea I have ever had in my life, and, throwing up all the pills I had just taken, all at the same time. Then crying because I knew that meant I had to take them all again as it had been less than an hour since I took them.
Now, I hardly notice taking my HIV medication and, at 53 years old I take twice as many pills just for being old man than I do for the HIV, with my statins, high-blood pressure, etc.
As for my life, I have developed a keen interest in patient advocacy and I help set up positive patient groups that spans the whole country, and I regularly take part in consultations with politicians, commissioners, clinical directors, and best of all, other patients. My friends stopped dying from HIV over a decade ago, and after twenty-five years being together, I plan on marrying the man I have loved for so long and without who I am sure this would be a very different story.
So, the moral of my story is..,
My story is only one amongst so many, and we have all been blessed with the gift of getting to live long, varied and dare I say it, happy lives - or at least that’s what my husbands always says - and he’s always right…!
