Can people living with HIV get the most out of rural living? Michael Ratsey thinks so
What’s it like being gay and HIV positive in a place where you’re
more likely to hear a cow blaring than a car radio? Where walking to the Post
Office five minutes down the road takes an hour because everyone passes on
the latest tit-bit of local knowledge, and where Mr Clarke asks you every
October precisely which day you’re going to give your lawn the final
autumn cut?
Like being part of a wheel, I know and accept in my role in this cycle. I
suspect that here I’ve managed to turn this sodding disease to my advantage.
Because of it, I hope I’m a more rounded person.
My virus and I have been together 11 years and I think of it a bit like a
miscreant mistress. When we first poked our heads above the village parapet
with white flag waving, I was loved by no one locally. My career took me elsewhere
and the village was just somewhere I happened to have a house.
Back then she was, at times, a demanding and exhausting mistress. She encouraged
my body to be invaded by rashes and fungal infections when she was only being
playful. As our time together progressed, she got more venomous, objecting
when I requested my body to do things it had always happily done: digging
a vegetable patch, carrying a bale of straw, even holding a ladder for someone
else. This way she reminded me who was in charge. The village watched concerned.
Mrs Moore was at the door with a steaming chicken stew and Mr Clarke mowed
both our lawns on the 14 October.
My mistress imposed more and more limitations until I trumped her with a few
NRTIs and calmed her down. For now, we live symbiotically and I no longer
think of her as quite such a hard mistress. We jog along in our village, but
she remains the driving force, influencing my decisions and sending me off
in directions I’d never considered before. But strangely, I can thank
her.
Without her I’d not be into alternative therapies and holistic thinking;
my public school education and engrained machismo values always pooh-poohed
them. And without her I would never have truly considered my own mortality
and wondered ‘what next?’.
Without her I would not have purchased Sunday clobber, polished my shoes and
tottered into the grand old village church. Mrs Moore and Mr Clarke invited
me into their pews and introduced me to the retired brigadier and to Bob the
electrician. Before a couple of months were out I had become a recipient of
their stories during the half-hour before we bowed our heads and cleared our
minds. Within the year both my virus and I were invited to small dinner parties,
where we nibbled vol-au-vents while earnestly organising the summer fête.
In other words, discussing the future when research was still telling me ‘your
future is not so long’. That was ten years ago.
Ok, there were a few negatives over the years: a bit of nonsense the Vicar
had to sort out over the challis and infected persons; one incident of name-calling
and sundry home visits by sweet and elderly ‘mean-wells’ who’d
stay and talk for hours about their grandchildren and arthritis while my mistress
was putting me through a day of total debilitation. And getting to my GUM
clinic takes a forty five minute drive each way and the hospital pharmacy
was slow to get itself together over new drugs. But as people with HIV are
not that numerous at the clinic, I am a precious commodity there. And the
nurse who draws my blood has been doing it for the entire 11 years and knows
Mr Clarke’s daughter who works in the bank. So the wheel goes round
and I, with my mistress, am part of it.
So what’s it like living with the virus in a backwater village where
the surnames of the present residents can also be seen on every gravestone?
I don’t think I’d swap it, though I wouldn’t mind if my
mistress took a holiday and gave me a break.
