“I believe I contracted the virus in August of 1994 since I was in the National Guard at the time and was tested pretty vigorously for drugs and HIV for my security clearance. I had dated one person and when that ended, on the rebound, had sex with an older gentleman where the condom broke. Shortly afterwards, around December 1994, I started getting sick and couldn’t shake it. It wasn’t until January 1995 that an emergency room doctor looked at my white tongue and suggested an HIV test. The first results were inconclusive so I went to LSU Medical Center where on February 9, 1995 they gave me my official diagnosis that I had seroconverted. Seven days before my twenty-first birthday and my life was over before it had even begun.
HIV gave me courage to take chances as far as living and doing things in life. Initially, I was shamed and fearful of sharing my status due to the stigma but eventually came to embrace it as a part of my life. I hate when people say it doesn't define you. Not literally, but in a way it helps to define your life. How it changes your mindset about time and your mortality I think was key part of my evolution. Going on 23 years with the virus, I find that my management gets more intensive as I age. We, after all, are the data for how the medicines and treatments are evaluated going forward. Currently I take Prezcobix, Viread, Ziagen.
Thanks to PrEP I'm not as fearful of being intimate with a negative person sexually any longer. I was so paranoid in my earlier years of having any type of sexual relations with a negative person that it really shut me down sexually.”
Eric, 43, undetectable. Washington, DC. Business analyst/grad student