How am I going to live my life if I’m positive? Will it be negative?
Like many others his age, Billy grew up with little knowledge of AIDS. For years, the media continued to single out particular groups, primarily homosexuals and drug addicts, as the only people affected by the disease. But as more and more is learned, AIDS cases in heterosexual teens and young adults have jumped to huge proportions.
“If I had known what I know now about the disease, say, five or ten years ago, all my options about relationships and sex would have changed. Back then, and even today, it’s a guy thing to sleep with as many girls as he does.” may be possible”. – something like bragging rights. Looking back now, trying to be cool is actually going to kill me.”
Billy, a 23-year-old blond California native, fits the typical surfer/boarder stereotype, except one thing sets Billy apart from the rest: he’s HIV positive. He is one of a growing number of teens and young adults who have been caught off guard by this once unknown disease. It is estimated that between the ages of thirteen to 24, one in 300 is infected with HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), the virus that leads to AIDS.
I think about life and immorality that is the first thing I do if I have HIV
At a local coffee shop, Billy and I talk about what happened. Sipping a mocha, he recalls the fateful day he found out about his circumstances.
“I remember all the details: going for a normal physical at the hospital and having my blood drawn. Everything seemed fine, and even the doctor mentioned that I seemed to be in good health. About two weeks later, ten days from my birthday. , a nurse from the hospital calls to ask me to come back, no explanation, nothing.”
They took my blood with an anonymous number two weeks waiting wondering
Billy thought he was sick with cancer, like several members of his family before him. “I was so afraid to go to the doctor,” he says. “I didn’t tell anyone, not even my parents or my girlfriend. The idea that they had to worry about me scared the hell out of me.” Billy pauses to reflect, then continues, “Something about the office and the doctor looming over me felt like he was at the gates of heaven waiting to meet my fate.” Then, BAM, like hitting a brick wall, the doctor told Billy that his blood test came back positive for HIV.
I should have done this a long time ago, lots of excuses why I couldn’t go. I know these things and I must know these things, because it is better to know than not to know!
“AIDS?” Billy answered. “Isn’t that some kind of homosexual or drug dealer thing?” Playing with his mocha, Billy remembers thinking, “There’s no way I could get something like that. It must have been a big mix-up. Then I thought, Oh shit, I must have used the same toilet seat.” or touched a doorknob used by an infected person. But the doctor went on to say there was no way you could get HIV from that, and then asked me if he had ever had unprotected sex, without a condom.” Billy had had unprotected sex.
“Yeah, a couple of times,” she says, “because they’re uncomfortable or I didn’t have one in the heat of the moment. I thought if the girl was on the pill, who needed to use a condom?
Was it really all that magic? the times I didn’t use a prophylactic
“(I) think it was a girl I dated in college about four or five years ago,” Billy thinks. According to the Center for Disease Control, AIDS cases in women have increased from 17 to 39 percent in the last four years. AIDS has become the sixth leading cause of death in the United States between the ages of fifteen and 24.
I am reading about how some behavior is transmitted. I must admit it. with whom I slept, with whom they slept, with whom they slept, with whom they slept.
Since learning of his diagnosis, one of the hardest things Billy has had to deal with is telling previous girlfriends he’s had sex with about the virus. “When I sat down to make a list of who I was sleeping with,” says Billy, “it started to freak me out how many there were.” Billy is not saying this to be perceived as a supposed “stud,” but as part of understanding his high-risk behavior and his role in contracting HIV.
“When I started calling them one by one,” recalls Billy, “I was faced with explaining what had happened and telling each of them that they needed to get tested.” I would have felt guilty for not doing it. He goes on to say that some of the girls were angry because they felt Billy had “killed” them, as one girl put it. Others were sympathetic and asked how they could help.
I picked up the phone and called my previous lovers that I never thought of infecting another all the times I said “Hmmm? Don’t bother.
Every day, like the estimated million other Americans who are HIV positive, Billy lives life to the fullest. “Sometimes I get really depressed,” he admits, “but I get over it and try to enjoy some of the simpler pleasures.” Billy sees life a little differently than you and I probably do, and as he talks about the different experiences he encounters every day, or his Tavarua surfing dreams he hopes to fulfill, Billy knows that now, unlike before, he has to be careful . of what his body will have in store in the future.
Would I have to change my whole life? Or would my life remain the same? sometimes it makes me want to scream! all these things are too difficult to think.
Over cold coffee, Billy brings out his growing frustration at what has been going on around him. He is afraid to tell his friends due to his lack of knowledge about HIV/AIDS. “I know that once I tell them,” says Billy, “I’ll become an instant leper, an outcast.” He claims that they are not the fault of his friends, but the failure of society to educate their peers about AIDS.
“Young adults need to see an alternative, not to be lectured, but to be educated about prevention,” explains Billy. “Too many groups are fighting over whether to teach safe sex, abstinence or hand out condoms in public schools, they don’t realize that while they’re fighting, more of us are dying because we don’t know the facts.”
How am I going to live my life if I’m positive? will it be negative?
As the afternoon draws to a close, Billy rushes in for a quick surf session before dark. I look out over the water: Billy is charging full force down the line. A few hours later, he rows back, bragging about every clipping he’s made and asking if we all saw it. He sometimes surprises me with his energy and his love for life, but now I understand how he perceives things. The disease that has taken so many has in no way slowed down Billy and his dreams. Billy can be different from the others because of that. He is still my friend.
A day to laugh, a day to cry, a day to live and a day to die until I find out, you may ask me, but I’m not going to live my life six feet under.
*lyrics written by Michael Franti, Charlie Hunter, performed by Spearhead, “Positive” appears on Spearhead’s Home CD and Red, Hot and Cool CD.