The following testimonial was written by a young man named Alex. He shares with us his experience with HIV from a loved ones point of view and how it shaped his life. We thank him for being so open and vulnerable and allowing us to share this with our audience. This is Alex's story.
"Hi there, my name is Alex and I am twenty-one years of age. While I personally have not
tested positive for HIV, I am still very closely affected by the virus. See, what a lot of people
don’t realize is just how hard it is on the surrounding friends and family as well when someone has a positive test. If I’m being honest, it’s terrifying.
A little backstory here, and I apologize if it is triggering. When I was very young; only
two or three years old; my mother (we’ll call her M) was a single parent. Well, one day we were out walking and ran into an old friend from high school (we’ll call him SD) that she was, well, she was always in love with him. It didn’t take long for him to start staying with us, and he moved in soon after. Almost immediately he became like a father to me, and that was just my dad. Just a little over a year later they decided that we needed to move to a bigger home, and only months later found out they were pregnant. I honestly can’t say much from memory about this point in time, seeing as how I was so young, but I do know that this was a much bigger deal than it would normally be. See, M has a rare hereditary medical condition that females can take medication and live with, but it attacks and kills the male body; we still can’t understand why it happens the way it does. So M is pregnant and finds out that it’s a little boy, and that she is going to be extremely high risk. SD seemed supportive and honestly excited, but that was from my perspective. Fast forward nine months, and M gives birth to a little boy (We’ll call him BB), who is immediately taken away and rushed to the NICU. There were complications, and BB was only alive for thirty-three hours before taking his final breaths. It was hard on everyone, and there were a lot of sudden changes. All I knew was that my mom was going to have my baby brother, but then we’re going home and he’s not with us. M and SD decided pretty quick that they couldn’t keep living in the house where BB was going to be brought home, and we moved again. SD started drinking heavily, and this was around the same time that computers really started becoming popular to have in your home. So SD is almost always drinking and meets another woman online. I remember coming home from kindergarten one day and there being a giant box blocking the front door, and SD is just throwing all of his things in it; he just left. Me and M ended up being homeless for a while, and it was hard, but this isn’t about that. Fast forward another nine months to right around either June or July of 2005. M and I were at a gas station using a pay-phone, trying to find somewhere to sleep for the night. I had to go inside while she was on the phone so I could use the restroom, and when I came out there was a car I had never seen next to my mother and she was talking to someone. I ran up and it was SD sitting in the car.
He said he had been looking for us for months; that he had made a mistake. He pretty much
rescued us and we moved in with him at his father’s home. M and SD got married in April of
2007, and we moved around a bit before finding a stable house in 2012, but things were always okay. Well, there’s the backstory, now for the actual reason I’m writing this.
In September of 2013, SD got very sick, very quick. Nobody could figure out what was
wrong; he was calling into work (which he never did), he was losing weight, he was so weak that he had to have a cane in each hand just to support himself long enough to walk to the bathroom. But he was stubborn, and it took almost two months of him just getting worse and worse before me and M were able to convince him to go to the Emergency Room and see a doctor. I remember my grandparents picking me up so I could stay with them and get to school (I was fourteen at this time), and being constantly terrified that M was going to call and say that SD was gone. I was in the dark and had no way out. They took a bunch of blood and sent it off for countless tests, but they still couldn’t figure out what was wrong until a few days later, when the HIV test results finally came in. He was positive. M and SD had been back together for eight years, so she got tested as well, and she was also positive. The next day, doctors told SD that he had two choices; he could either take these pills for the rest of his life and hopefully get better, or he could refuse the pills and be dead in a month, if he even made it that long. That’s how sick he ended up getting before getting help.
I still remember getting that phone call. I had just gotten back to my grandparent’s house
from school, and my grandmother called me into the room to talk to M on the phone. She was crying and just begging me to try and understand what was going on. When she told me that they both had HIV, she told me that I had to go and get tested next; that them helping me clean cuts and scrapes as a kid could’ve actually caused me to have the virus as well. Now, I had to grow up extremely quick as a young child, especially while M and SD were separated, so I understood a lot more than anyone realized. The problem was that in school, they taught us about STDs and HIV/AIDS, but what they taught us was that you couldn’t eat/drink after someone who has HIV, use the same toilet as someone with the virus, and they pushed fear instead of real education. I remember the same night that I got that phone call, I snuck out of my room when my grandparents were asleep and stayed up all night doing research online about HIV and what it really is. I can honestly say I was shocked when I realized how much of what I had been taught wasn’t even true. It took around a month for the medicine to start working well enough for SD to gain some strength, and when he was finally able to be safely released, I remember being so excited. We were going to be able to be together again! I honestly missed them, a lot. But then M and SD
told me that they weren’t going home yet, and that they were going to go live with SD’s dad for a month so they had help. I understood, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt. My grandparents had a different reaction though, and they immediately got DCS involved and tried to legally adopt me out from under my mother, claiming that her HIV diagnoses made her an unfit mother. It was honestly hell living there.
Look, I don’t want to tell you my life story. I want to tell you about this virus, and how it
has affected so many lives. There are so many random times in my life where I remember false information being spread about HIV and I would always be so mad. If it was in school, which happened every year until graduation, I would always stand up and go to the front of the class and do my best to properly educate people. I will admit, I got in quite a bit of trouble for it a few times, but I will gladly take a small punishment if it means that someone now knows how to protect themselves. Over the years as I got older, we started becoming more social as a family, and throughout time we had a couple roommates stay with us, and M always disclosed their status; she was afraid of them finding out through someone else. Almost every time I ended up being the one who would sit down with them and answer any questions they had. I was happy that now, even if they never needed it, they would be educated about how to stay safe in a situation where they may potentially be exposed. I’ve always thought that proper education could bring positive test numbers down so much, and I really wish there was a way to make sure false information isn’t spread.
Now, if I’m being completely honest, as a teenager I had quite a few personal issues and
ended up in and out of youth homes. I managed to get into a program for older youth that would help them get their own apartments and jobs, and they would continue to help until the youth turned twenty-five years old. I had already found an apartment and was working at this point, and I was so ready to make that jump and start my own life, but things didn’t end up going that way. Instead, I got a call from M one day telling me that she was getting sick, and she couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I signed myself out of the youth home (I was eighteen by this time) and moved back to my parents the next week. I had to take care of her, and I couldn’t do that from across town. I ended up losing my job within a week after moving back due to not having transportation anymore. I had to drop out of college, and that put me in quite a bit of debt that I still haven’t been able to pay off yet. Turns out M was becoming sicker due to the HIV and her medicine wasn’t working anymore. After a few months they finally figured out what was wrong and got the problem taken care of, but just in that short amount of time, I lost so many things that I was working towards for my future. I don’t mean to sound selfish in any way, but I really lost a lot. Sometimes I still wonder where my life would be if I had continued on the route I was going.
The next couple of years were fairly calm as far as the virus goes, but it didn’t stay like
that forever. See, this is where it really gets hard. Just recently, SD came to M and said that he wanted a divorce; this was after eighteen years of being together, and seven years of both being positive for HIV. Now M is struggling to find her own happiness, and constantly fearing being judged when a new person finds out about her status. There have already been several instances just in the few months since this occurred that random people have found out M’s HIV status and either given threats or tried to cause problems with violence. It hurts knowing that she has to continue to live in fear due to miseducation, and I just hope that we can someday make a change for the better and just simply allow people’ positive or negative for the virus; to just co-exist as humans. I know that I will take every opportunity I can to properly educate people, in hopes that other children will not have to continue to grow up in fear of losing their family due to an illness that we have come to medical advanced with treatments. HIV is no longer a “killer virus”; it can be treated, and hopefully someday cured.
I’m sorry that this turned out so long, but I thank you for reading this far. This is my
story, with many more years to come. All I ask is to please, properly educate yourselves."
At Matthew 25 our mission is to support, educate and treat those infected with and affected by HIV/AIDS. With this we continue to fight against the stigma around HIV/ AIDS. To get more information and resources on HIV/ AIDS please contact us through our webiste, social media, or simply by giving us a call.
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