HIV Positive -HIV and Growing old

Before HIV, it was wonderful. It was one big party; I was an employee of Studio; I was a busboy, and there was a lot of drug-taking. I lived in an apartment building on the Lower East Side, and gay men entirely occupied it. Everyone in that apartment building except for me passed from AIDS.

They died in very quick succession. I was diagnosed in 1984. I’ve never really looked sick people look at us, and they see these muscle healthy looking guys, and their attitude is, well, you’re fine. They don’t see what goes on behind the scenes today. I take approximately 13pills every day, have to count, and make sure I have the right amount. I’m suffering right now from long-term side effects that are very bad.

I take pills for high blood pressure for cholesterol for the ulcerations, which I’m now taking double doses of. I often joke that if I do live to be 70 or 80I’ll have a wheelbarrow full of medicine that will double as a walker what are the biggest challenges for someone who’s a long-time survivor of HIV is to maintain that level of adherence to medications and also to deal with the fact that they’re aging.

There’s some concern that HIV in itself may adversely impact the aging process. There is a lot of conversation about frailty, and our people with HIV potentially frailer or are immunologically older than their age. I’ve developed a disease called avascular necrosis because of the long-term use of HIV treatment.

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The blood supply has been cut off to my joints especially, and the bones are dying. I’ve had four operations this year. They had to take my hip and plant apart twice. So now that I have these mobility issues, it affects our day-to-day living. We’ve had to install an elevator chair. So I can get up and down the stairs; we know that by 2015 half of each positive individual in this country will be 50and older. By 2020 that’s 70 percent for older adults who get infected later. So they’re still negotiating what it means to be HIV positive. It’s new to them for long-term survivors negotiating a lifetime of living with this disease, and one night I just became discouraged and hopeless away. I’d never been, and I swallowed 300pills the doctors said that I would either be in a coma for the rest of my life or die but that I would likely die, and some great miracle I woke up my depression was clinical, not so much situational, but certainly, I think it was exacerbated by the circumstances that I found myself in.

It’s hard to sit and be powerless in the face of some of this. I can try to make them as comfortable as possible, not allowing him to do nothing but instead say, hey, let’s go to a movie or go out to dinner. We jokingly say it to each other, but we mean it sincerely that even going to the supermarket or just hanging out at home and watching a movie, we enjoy each other’s company. So while there are disappointments along the way, there are certainly plenty of wonderful times HIV is now a chronic disease that we can manage.

So you can take that very same statement and turn it the other way and say, Oh, HIV is a chronic disease that we can manage. So what’s the big deal that has potentially impacted people who are coming up coming of age and coming into risk-on in the way that they think about risk in general when we ask men in our studies now young men what they worry about, they worry about finding a job find a new place to live having money yes they worry about HIV. Still, it’s not number one. Maybe it’s number 1eight, nine or ten at chicken pie country homemade ham butter on the bread. Still, the best darn thing about grandma’s house was the great bee. So what message do I come up with to get across to these young people that they have to take every precaution necessary because they may live a long life?

It may not be the kind of life they were hoping for. I’m in my 30th year of sickness. For the last 23, I have thought about death almost every day and wonder when my luck will run out. I’m trying to not focus on HIV and make it my whole life, and it’s very challenging, but I’m making headway being out on a big ranch is a way of life that we cherish, and we don’t intend to change the other trans fats, and they’re illegal it’s just about making an effort to save a life.

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