TWO YEARS: LAUGHTER & TEARS
Don’t they grow up so fast! My HIV is two years old and I think I’ve got the little bugger toilet trained, under control and undetectable. Not seen and not heard? … Someone said that homosexuality, ‘the love that dare not speak its name has become the love that just won’t shut up!’ It seems now (in this neck of the woods at least) that its bastard child HIV gives me ever more cause for speculative chatter. These days I’m more concerned about early onset dementia from depression than I am about late onset HIV but let me tell you a thing or two I’ve found out about both.
When I sero-converted two years ago I was shaken twice. Once by the fact that I had finally contracted it at 42 after having completely convinced myself that I could not, and would not, contract it. In hindsight this idea was clearly a delusion on my part and trust me, the reason I hadn’t contracted it was more good luck than good management. The second shock was how ill I became and how long the illness lasted. I became sick exactly two weeks after ‘conception’ and took over three months to get better. Even then I was functioning at about 60% of the health I had been used to previously. By the time it got to June 2007 my doctor who is a veteran of this epidemic and to whom I had been going for twelve years said I really should give medication a go. I had been holding out, hoping for a five or ten year honeymoon period like so many others I knew seemed to have had…For me it seemed a case of the later you convert, the harder you fell.
Interestingly the initial illnesses which included pneumonia, shingles and prolonged fevers had less impact on me than a condition I’d already been battling with for ten years: depression. The depression I felt was in no way linked to the HIV and didn’t seem to worsen because of it. I had been on and off antidepressants for years. There are, of course, those experts who would say depression and its symptomatic lack of self esteem contributed to the situation that allowed me to contract the HIV in the first place, but in my case I would refute that. I’d had plenty of unprotected sex with positive people long before my depression came into the equation. No, depression is an hereditary trait that runs through families like a genetic strand bypassing some and manifesting in others. It has by far proven the most formidable adversary in my life and makes HIV feel like a treat!
After biting the bullet and starting on Kivexa and Efavirenz in June last year, I was blown away. Within three days I felt like a new person (or the old person I used to be). The first night I was tripping off my tits and should not have driven a car the next day! The second night, the most extraordinary thing happened…In my dream (and let me tell you the dreams that come with Efavirenz are both compelling and enlightening) I was treated to what I could only describe as ‘a nocturnal product initiation promo’ in which I found myself wandering into a vast tunnel constructed entirely out of Kivexa boxes and blister packs. If you can imagine Alice in Wonderland being led down the rabbit hole combined with the Monty Python scene from The Meaning of Life where the characters all die at a dinner party from eating salmon mousse, then drive their Volvos to Heaven (which turns out to be a Holiday Inn with topless waitresses…) then you can appreciate this dream. I awoke quite convinced that GlaxoSmithKline, the manufacturers of Kivexa® had integrated this orientation program into their pretty orange pills…And who is to say they haven’t? In truth Efavirenz is the real dreamweaver and through it I had entered The Matrix. Keanu had nothing on me.
Together these two medications took my ‘unprecedentedly high’ viral load to undetectable and increased my TCells from 250 to 800 in six months. My fears of side-effects were unfounded it turns out and apart from feeling a little woozy if I get up in the middle of the night, I can’t complain.
What I have learned with the Efavirenz which I take between 9.30 and 10.30 at night is that sex is better before they kick in too much. This usually means having sex before taking the drugs or shortly afterwards. They don’t make sex unpleasant or impossible but they do tend to affect erectile function a little and blur sensations to some extent. It’s druggie sex but it doesn’t follow the recreational model some of us have grown to favour.
Secondly I find I can’t drink as much alcohol as I used to (I think the drugs might be trying to tell me something). I get drunk faster and often experience heart palpitations throughout the night and the following morning. This concerned me enough at one point that I was given an ECG and fitted with a heart monitor for an entire twenty four hours. There was nothing wrong with my heart.
Thirdly, I do get more tired. I walk two kilomtetres each way to and from work and spend ten hours, four days a week, at my office with an hour at the gym in the middle. This often leaves me very wilted and falling asleep at any movie or theatre show that isn’t utterly enthralling.
In thirteen months I have missed three doses of my medication and on one occasion (I blame dementia for this) I accidentally double-dosed. I woke up feeling so sick and so much pain around my middle I thought I would die. I seriously don’t recommend doing this! And it is hard when something becomes so habitual as these pills do, to remember if you’ve medicated or not. I suppose more organised people than myself use those pill boxes?
But getting back to the dementia-depression thing…I made a discovery through all of this that has been really positive, via a friend who suffered terrible depression last year. I have never been happy (ha ha) on SSRIs for depression. They help at first, but for me they send waves of nauseousness through me from time to time, they make me sweat like crazy which makes them almost unbearable in Sydney’s summer, they steal all my empathy and they affect sexual function in a number of negative ways. When I discovered a US vitamin company called TrueHope who specialize in a vitamin supplement that effectively suppresses the extremes of depression, I was really stoked. They are expensive and my doctor pooh poohs them as being overpriced placebos but after twelve months, I am a convert. Just recently I ran out for nearly two weeks and the effect was tangible within days.
I think about HIV and being on medication for the rest of my life (if that is indeed going to be the case) then remember all sorts of people are on all sorts of medication at my age. My father was on 15-20 tablets a day since he was 25 and died at 46 (not from HIV as far as I know). I think about all the healthy food I buy and cook, the vitamin supplements I’ve found, the availability of exercise and the access I have in Sydney to services and health professionals and then I remember people talking ten years ago about how in fifteen years treating HIV will be no more of an ordeal than Diabetes. Well I think I’ll take my HIV over a number of chronic conditions thanks. With depression I’m learning that life is far too important to be taken seriously, and whatever happens, I already look set to outlive my father. For me HIV is now, as it was two years ago…the very least of my worries.
Neal Drinnan has worked in publishing and journalism and is the author of four novels - Glove Puppet, Pussy's Bow, Quill and Izzy and Eve, as well as The Rough Guide to Gay and Lesbian Australia and numerous short stories.
