.
Hiv+'ers have become to the bacterial, viral, infection world what the butterfly is to the environmental world. Lots of pollution means little or no butterflies. Lots of bacteria, virusses and general nasty diseases means lots of very ill Hiv+'ers.
We have little or no defense of our own against most common or garden virusses. Everyone of us on hiv medication is in actuality constantly in chemotherapy. Add to that all the stuff that depresses the immune system of even healthy people, like depression etc and its hardly surprising that it sometimes seems as though we are dropping like flies.
Anything weird, wonderful, and exotic that hasn't been seen in centuries, type disease we seem to get. Have we turned into disease sponges? Has this stuff been around for years and years waiting for humans to drop their guard physically? I'm knocking on wood as i write this, but I'm not going to be surprised when the first cases of Bubonic Plague show up.
Lets not forget also the run of the mill epidemic/pandemic scares like Avian Flu, TBC en MRSA.
MRSA is of course nothing new. Its been the great fear of all health institutions for quite a few years now. Why? Well, first and foremost financially. Closing down wards and putting wings into quarantine is not good for the budget.
Oh yes, and people die of it too.
But thankfully for the hospitals its only people with poor immune systems like old people and hiv +'ers.
My old House Doctor always told me to use all means and measures possible to avoid going to hospital. Because, as he put it, "If you want to go down with something really nasty then stay away from the place where they put all the people with really nasty stuff together".
One (if not
the) reason that implementation of vaccine programmes against, for example, HPV is that the only people in real danger of getting anal cancer from it are people with a poor immune system who allow other people to put penisses into their anal cavities.
I try not be cynical about this sort of thing but its hard not to be.
In a lot of cases a lot of pain and hardship could be relieved or avoided completely if Gay Poz men were seen as a valid group of patients. Which is of course what patient support organisations are for. Care and support for the own patient group, and lobbying within the establishment for (amongst other things) adequate representation. Unfortunately most patient support organisations aren't willing to bite the hand that feeds it. Especially in the Netherlands where funding is to a large degree directly and/or directly from the government. The world has long envied us for having government funding for Aids and Hiv but there are great problems, opportunities for mis-use, etc. inherent in the system, but that's stuff for another article.
Gay Poz men want to be seen as 'normal' people. But we aren't and can never be until we stop being patients. We are, by definition of the condition we have, people with little or no defenses of our own against the world around us.
The current MRSA scare in the States is pre-presidential campagne propaganda, but is symptomatic of how we as Gay Poz men are perceived; the perpetrators of medical evil and the origins of all things epidemic.
No. We are the victims not the perpetrators.
Saying that we are victims is going to get me angry responses from the brethren I know, but it doesn't work any other way. The longer we tell each other that a couple of pills a day means that we can live life like 'normal' people then the longer we live our lives with our heads in the sand.
As people we don't want to be 'deficient', and as Gay men we would rather be 'absolutely flawless'. As Gay Poz men we can't be perfect, so we try to be Poz Perfect. How many times have you seen on a dating site "Hiv+ but healthy". Don't get me wrong, I applaud anyone who has the guts to be on a dating site and openly disclose their status there.
But what is being said here?
"I'm hiv+ but I can function in society as if I wasn't",
"I'm hiv+ but I don't look like I am",
"I'm hiv+ but no-one would ever know if I didn't tell them",
"I'm hiv+ but that doesn't mean I'm ugly",
"I'm hiv+ but that doesn't mean I'm not hot and gorgeous and fuckable",
"I'm hiv+ but don't worry there's no drama involved"?
So how subjective
is health?
.
