Chickens and Eggs

I'm a bit simple when it comes to the larger questions in life. And I'm fairly adamant about my simplicity. If the question is "Which came first: the chicken or the egg?", my response is "Who cares? Whichever one you have now is the one you deal with. And you can successfully fry either. "

Returning to the inference that My Therapist made to "This Situation", I definitely harbor the same opinion. What does it matter what led to it? The only thing to do is accommodate the new reality. If decisions were poorly taken, what's done is done. Whether malice or ignorance was at play becomes irrelevant once you look somebody in the eye and they all but pronounce you terminally ill. I'd have thought that 25 years into the epidemic, we'd be past answering for our disease. I thought wrong.

I don't believe My Therapist meant to impugn my mental health or intelligence in our last session. I am quite troubled, however, that conversations still turn in that general direction. Small wonder so many of us clam up and hide away, doing as much damage to our psyches as the virus does to our bodies. I can't say that the question isn't worth asking. Neither, however, can I get past my irritation at answering for something that doesn't really warrant a question. I've been in the habit of acknowledging the truth of my status and moving on to more interesting topics. We forget, I suppose, that not everyone is on the same page with us.

A new gentleman joined us for dinner at the HIV Social on Friday night. He was several years into knowing of his status but had yet to inform a number of people in his social circle. We talked about how much less stressful it is to exhale the truth than to hold it in. We also talked about how important it is to realize that people have to catch up to us when they learn of our illness. He's had years to process the implications of his infection, his family will require time to catch up. Having been through that process with my entire family many years ago, it was a reminder to me that I will still encounter people who require some catch-up time. On the heels of my last appointment with My Therapist, it was especially instructive.

I'd figured out I was HIV+ the autumn prior to my test results. I am 6' tall and weighed about 124 lbs. I couldn't swallow more than a couple of bites of food before I felt ill. I had white spots in my mouth and throat. Oozing sores would drip down behind my ears from my scalp. A fever would not quit. I couldn't stay awake for more than a couple of hours at a time. Something was wrong. I remember my pharmacist friend used to say (in 1987), "When you're gay, every time you sneeze, you wonder if you have it." So I knew.

I went to a doctor to have the swallowing problem fixed. It was thrush. He informed me, nervously, that grown-ups don't get thrush unless they have a compromised immune system. I knew what that meant, too. I didn't have insurance yet with my new employer, so I was petrified of a positive test prior to being insured. I ignorantly assumed that I would be unable to get the medicines I was hearing might prolong my life. The first protease inhibitor had hit the market 2 years earlier. That doctor refused to treat any of my symptoms if I didn't take the HIV Test. I walked out without so much as a Tylenol in my pocket.

I headed to the Free Health Clinic and laid my cards on the table with a Nurse Practitioner who agreed to treat my symptoms in exchange for my promise to return immediately upon obtaining my insurance for the HIV Test. I kept my word. I traveled to my family for the holidays looking emaciated. We scurried off for a family photo that everyone thought might be our last. I look like a skeleton in a yellow turtleneck in that picture. It hung in my parents' bedroom for too long. At the family home, I encountered something of an intervention. I was labeled "anorexic". I assured them I loved food and was not anorexic, but that they might want to sit down for the real story. They already knew I was gay. That didn't help when I said that I had blood drawn for an HIV Test and that they might want to prepare themselves for the results that I would get on January 2. My father didn't say anything. There were some tears in the mix. And there was this, courtesy of my mother:

"Well, Merry Fucking Christmas."

I didn't take the time to challenge the notion that it was all about dampening her Christmas '97 memories. I was only a few weeks into accepting the probable result myself. I made one phone call, to my closest confidante, during the waiting period to confess my suspicions and begin my own acceptance process. I knew everyone else would be at least a step behind.

A few days ago, a dear friend wrote me to announce she was beginning treatment for a number of malignant tumors. I wrote to her that I remembered the day of my own diagnosis. I sat dry-eyed on the examining table while the Nurse Practitioner and a back-up clinician delivered the news. They looked a little more shaken than I felt. (One of The Boys relates how he had to console his doctor when he delivered the news.) I had already moved past "What if I am?" and was already in "What do I do?". It took a lot of convincing to get them to stop trying to make me break down so that I could satisfy their expectations of how people react to Really Bad News. They had a cute little visual aid that talked about trains and cliffs.

"Your viral load is the speed of the train and the number of t-cells you have is the length of the track. The higher your viral load, the faster the train. The lower your t-cells, the shorter the track. A fast train on a short track sends the train down into The Valley of Bad Things Happening." That's verbatim, as I recall it. They really called it The Valley of Bad Things Happening. I guess that's the secular version of The Valley of The Shadow of Death. Kinda catchy. P.S., they noted, "You have a very fast train on a very short track: 60 t-cells and a viral load over 700,000." Every single person you ask will tell you a different number of "ideal" t-cells for a healthy human. None of those numbers is 60. Anything below 200 automatically qualifies you as having "AIDS" - particularly if you have an "Opportunistic Infection", which my thrush was. All I wanted was the stack of prescriptions so we could start lengthening track and slowing down the train. All they wanted was a breakdown so they wouldn't fear me hurling myself off the tallest building in Des Moines, I think. They underestimated my fear of death. In a suicide pact, I'll always let you go first. You'll never know that I didn't follow through.

I told my old friend, Paula (she of the tumors), that I went past the pharmacy, picked up my pills and then went home and sat in the pitch-black stairwell that led from my rooftop apartment down the back of the old Victorian house where I lived. I didn't flip on the light, I just sat there in the dark and breathed. Out of nowhere, a song overwhelmed me. My voice was shit. Thrush had gone from my mouth down into my esophagus. I had sung at a cousin's wedding a few months earlier with what I thought was atrocious laryngitis. But I sang in the stairwell that day:

"When peace like a river attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll,
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
'It is well! It is well with my soul!'"

And it was. And has been. I put away questions of who, when, where and why in that stairwell. I got up, I phoned Joyce, I swallowed the first pills and we both waited in curiosity for something to go numb or fall off, I think. When we bored of the wait, we hung up and I began the traditional side-effects of vomiting, diarrhea, sweats, etc. But I never asked why me? I remember a television special shortly after that where a man was asked about his misfortune. His words were seared into my consciousness, "It never occurred to me to ask 'Why me?'", he said, "I thought, 'Why NOT me?"

That was all the empowerment I needed to put the questions and the blame and the recriminations behind me for good. No looking back. I would live, for as long as I lived, without regret, shame or blame. I would live in integrity and to hell with anyone who couldn't keep up. Maybe that's the whole layered lasagna that I owed My Therapist when he suggested that I had gotten myself into this situation. Perhaps I should have redefined the situation for him.

What he called an egg was already a chicken for me.