Turning A Personal Fight With AIDS Into A Public Crusade?

 Not long ago someone asked for me to participate in an effort to help create awareness regarding the issue of HIV and AIDS. This person has a sincere desire to promote understanding on the issue and to bring to the forefront the fact that HIV/AIDS is not limited to any one group of people.

The request has left me feeling a bit irresponsible and with a nagging question in the back of my mind.

It led me to wonder whether or not my being HIV+ and a politically active Republican, places a special burden of responsibility on me. If the answer is yes, the question becomes, what role should I play? How I can best fulfill this so-called responsibility confuses me. You see I don't know if I have any answers. Aside from offering up my own experience for consideration, I do not believe that I can dare give another person advice or make their road any easier to travel .

This is not the first time that I allowed myself to personally struggle with this question. I have often wondered if the combination of my personal infliction with my political affiliation requires me to fulfill some special role. But there are other issues I also struggled with. Issues like simply having the strength and will power to face the coming of each new day with a deadly virus.

It has been almost six years since I was first diagnosed and in that time I have both struggled to live with HIV and to find my place in society with it. In that time, I have learned that I am the last person to be held up as an example for others to use in their own quest for the same.

For me, the road is not something that I have mastered very well.

I remember the early evening when I was first diagnosed.

It was late in the summer and I was sitting in a hospital bed being treated for pneumonia. Doctors found it suspicious for a relatively young man, such as myself, to catch pneumonia out of the blue, as I did. So they ran tests. Early one evening a doctor, whose name I still do not know, came to the foot of my bed, and with his hands in the pockets of his white lab coat, he stood before me and with broken English and a heavy Indian accent said "I am sorry to tell you but you are HIV+". He then said, "that is what helped to lead to your pneumonia". Those few life changing words were followed by "another doctor will be visiting you soon" and then he left as quickly as he came.

I laid in bed in shock. I did not know what to think. I did not know how to react. I was numb.

One part of me accepted the diagnosis as a doomed fate and another part, if it didn't deny it, it did its best to ignore it and try to forget it.

That constant struggle between dealing with it and forgetting about it still exists and the combination of the two is key to my own ability to deal with it and survive.

I deal with it by trying to do my best to stick to a strong regimen that includes the taking of a dozen different medications every day, timed exactly twelve hours apart. I deal with it by then trying to ignore and deny the side effects of those medications. I try to pretend that I am not nauseas or drowsy. I try to ignore the neuropathy in my hands and feet and the lack of energy to get up and go. I try to ignore the fact that I often feel better skipping a dose or two of my required meds than I do after actually taking them.

But trying to forget, is only a part of my coping mechanism. It is the easy part. Dealing with the truth has been the hard part. Telling my parents that their son was HIV+ was difficult. Probably the most difficult thing in my life. Telling my partner was also difficult. Especially given the fact the we had only been seeing each other for a matter of months before I was diagnosed. I was sure that after unloading this information on someone you have been dating for a relatively short period of time, would definitely put an end to the relationship.

It didn't. Almost six years later, he still stands by me and I by him.

I think few can claim to be as fortunate as I. Few have found someone with the strength and conviction of my partner. He could have easily walked away and spared himself from dealing with my burdens and the risks to him. But he didn't.

After hearing the news of my diagnosis, other parents may have been emotionally paralyzed by fear. Others may have been overcome with shame and embarrassed by the stigmas attached. Mine embraced me and assisted me in what turned out to be a long and difficult introduction to initial treatments.

I have indeed been quite fortunate.

By my facing the truth I made it possible for the ones I love to stand by me during my neediest hour.

So I don't know if my careful mix of dealing with facts and then trying to forget is something that should be held out as an example. It is not brave or particularly honorable. It is just my way of coping with my reality. The real heroes here are those who have stood by me. Without them I might not have the strength to endure the ongoing battle that is being waged in me. Without them I might try to deny too much and deviate from the constant trips to doctors, routine blood tests and prescribed daily routines that proper treatment requires. Without them I would also not have the ability to find the occasional escape from reality that helps to provide me with some peace of mind.

The way, I see it, the most that I can add to the issue of HIV/AIDS in society is my honest admission of the fact that I have it. My admission helps to make it clear to others that HIV/AIDS is out there and that it has no prejudice or limitation to any one of society's labeled groups. It simply exists and needs to be dealt with. Beyond that, I am simply trying to deal with it myself and in doing so, I do not know if I have any advice that is superior to anyone else's.

I will say this though.

It may have taken decades to happen, but the United States has, and our people have, come a long way in regards to HIV/AIDS. It is no longer the automatic death sentence that it once was and it is no longer some modern myth of a disease created by God to kill homosexuals.

Granted, there are some who may still think that way. Those people do not make it any easier for people like myself to be truthful about it. People like that made it quite hard for me to admit the truth. The common held perceptions regarding how and why HIV/AIDS is transmitted makes it hard enough to admit. I was fearful of the immediate thoughts that came to people's minds when they heard. Does he do drugs? Is he promiscuous? These are just some of the still natural thoughts perpetuated as the result of hearing ones being diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. That type of speculation is embarrassing enough but extremists simply make it unnecessarily more difficult by adding their own additional false mix of bigotry, intolerance and assorted spin to it.

The fact is that HIV/AIDS is not limited to homosexuals or intravenous drug users. Acceptance of this fact has helped the United States to lead the way in combating the disease.

Not only has compassion and understanding helped those who have it to cope with it, it has led to a union of political ideologies that has allowed liberals and conservatives to fight against a common enemy together.

In 2002 it was a prominent conservative Senator who publicized the fact that in Africa the disease was usually transmitted heterosexually. His outreach on the issue helped change the minds of some who previously disregarded HIV/AIDS as a strictly homosexual disorder or considered it a God-sent punishment.

During that same time the son of Billy Grahm convened a first "international Christian conference on HIV/AIDS." At it, Evangelical Protestant, Catholic leaders and overseas missionaries from AIDS-stricken countries gathered in Washington, D.C., and created a plan called "Prescription for Hope". It demanded treatment for the sick and the dying and it convinced American religious conservatives that it was their moral duty to do something about the pandemic.

The bipartisan fight against HIV/AIDS became so prevalent that it found its way into many different fronts and conservatives were among its leaders.

When a World Health Organization report stated that 500,000 new AIDS transmissions occurred every year through unsafe needles and blood transfusions, leading conservative Republican, Jeff Sessions of Alabama took the issue on.

Some AIDS activists were afraid that religious conservatives, such as him, would use the issue to undermine prevention efforts and justify diverting funds from condom distribution and reproductive health programs. But Sessions' safe health care initiative proved them wrong. While calling for new studies to clarify the source of AIDS transmission, Sessions neither refuted the role of sexual transmission in the pandemic nor criticized safe-sex programs.

By the time Jeff Sessions was done, he was responsible for establishing enough bipartisan support to mainstream the issue of injection and blood safety into U.S. funded prevention strategies. This successfully reversed decades of neglect and offered considerable support for building proper health infrastructure in the poorest countries in Africa.
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Another good example was President George W. Bush.

Never one to be accused of demonstrating partisan allegiance to left leaning schools of thought and liberal concerns, he dedicated more money and international focus , than any other President in history, to fighting the pandemic of AIDS.

That union of left and right has forged together a plan to fight HIV/AIDS at home as well as abroad. Not only has it helped to stem the rising number of HIV/AIDS cases worldwide, it has forged together an effective approach to HIV/AIDS that involves not just prevention of transmission but treatment for it. In earlier days, preventing the transmission of the disease was where most all of the focus was relegated to. That left those inflicted, to a slow demise that came about after a long list of debilitating and often painful complications that developed as more and more of the bodies organs and functions shut down. But education, understanding, compassion and the lifting of stigmas has afforded hope to people like myself where there once was none.

It also bought people like me more time.

Now, I could try to spend that time trying to find reason to put myself forward as some example but, in my view, that would be pointless. I am not an example. I am a beneficiary of the efforts and sacrifices of others before me. People like Ryan White, a thirteen year old boy who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion and before his death in 1990, fought off discrimination by his school district.

I am simply coping. I am simply handling things as they come. That gives me no more experience than anyone else. In many ways it makes me like everybody else.

We all have our own hurdles in life. Some of them may be manmade hurdles created by naïve mistakes, youthful indiscretions or just plain old bad choices that we made. Other hurdles may be the result of circumstances beyond our control. Either way, there exists one common denominator. It is the fact that each of us have to overcome those hurdles.

How we try to overcome those hurdles is ultimately up to each individual and the collective goodwill of those around them.

The major issue we must all confront is the fact that as a nation and as a people, we can not stereotype any one hurdle. Instead, we must acknowledge our need and ability to overcome those hurdles together.

For me, admitting the truth about my circumstance and my own hurdles is probably the most that I can do. I don't see myself as a very strong person, just a stubborn one. So it may not seem like much, but for me, to admit the truth about having HIV and its progression to AIDS was a big step for me. I am a thin skinned fellow. The type whose ears burn if I feel anyone is talking about me. Opening myself up to the conjecture and judgment of others based on the fact that I am positive does not sit well with me. But I feel keeping it a secret would be an abandonment of truth that is not fair to others who suffer from HIV/AIDS or to those before me whose lives were lost to it because they felt a need to keep it hidden from a judgmental world.

I am no Rosa Parks or Harvey Milk. I am not a Martin Luther King, Jr. or Susan B. Anthony. I am one person, coping with the hand I have been dealt. That does not make me different or special. That just makes me like everyone else.

As such I choose not to address you as the gay Republican, or the guy with AIDS. I choose to address you as a fellow American. Not a special needs American or the leader of a cause or special interest group.

Just an American.

That is, after all, all that each of us are. No matter what our unique circumstance or special characteristics, we are all Americans and the overriding question is, how do we all live together and accommodate all of our unique desires or special needs as one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all?