Today is Thursday, February 1, in the year 2001, and I’ve been hospitalized at St. Luke’s/Roosevelt for over two weeks now. I had an abscess in my back that had to be drained. This abscess also pushed up into my right lung, irritating it and causing a collecting of fluid to collect between my diaphragm and lung. This fluid has been drained twice. The irritated lung eventually became infected with pneumonia, for which I must take IV antibiotics for ten days. This is the seventh day. Although I’m HIV positive, apparently none of this is related to HIV. In fact, my viral load and T-cell count both look very good for someone who hasn’t taken any HIV medication in five years.
I feel pretty good now. For a while, I began to hate being here. Last week, during a procedure which I hoped would end with my detachment from the drainage bag that had been attached to my back for the last week, I broke down and sobbed when I realized that’s was not the reality – the bag had been replaced. At that moment, I really hated being here.
Eventually, I got over it. I struggled to focus my thoughts on getting better. I visualized what I might look like doing things in the future, like just being home or playing capoeira. It helps when you have friends who visit and call, but the hardest thing is maintaining that healing focus – even after that bright good cheer of visits and calls has faded. There’s also the added benefit of discovering who your true friends really are.
HIV has been a concern of mine for almost 6 years now, even though I haven’t really dealt with it in years. It presents so many concerns – Who do I tell? What medications do I take, if any? How do I live with this? How do I feel attractive and desirable with this virus? How do I tell my mother?
Well, I’ll probably get to implement the answer to that last question very soon – Mommy’s coming up to New York to visit me in the next couple of days. I just plan on telling her plain out, before I explain what’s going on with me now. I know it’s going to hurt, but I know, eventually, it won’t.
I think I’ve been living a pretty healthy lifestyle (well, at least for the past six months) but I am a weakling. Is it because of HIV or something else? This is something that I’ve made a priority to look into, but I don’t think I’m going to go running to take all these HIV medications. I think I might try Edna’s guy – I’m really looking for a more holistic approach to better health that takes into consideration that I’m already pretty healthy.
