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increase in my CD4 count, my happiness was short-lived, turning quickly
into frustration as he inevitably pronounced: "good, you are very
well".
At that moment all the things that I had thought of talking over with
him, all those things that had been worrying me while crossing the threshold
of his office, were erased from my mind, as though the only important
things were those two measurements. What's more, the authoritarian tone
of his pronouncements made me feel to a certain extent guilty. I didn't
really feel that happy, and in my humble opinion I wasn't all that well.
I took the weight of it all onto my shoulders and tried to be as strong
as I could. I thought: "You've got to make the most of things; you've
got to do your best and be strong; the most important thing is to be alive,
everything else is less important." A sense of 'sacrifice' that is
common to the Catholic tradition of the society that I live in, with traces
of the Spanish macho that, in spite of knowing myself to be gay from an
early age, I have surely inherited in some way!
Neither the diarrhoea, nor the cramps in my legs, nor that sudden extended
stomach, nor my pinched face and hollow cheeks should worry me. Grin and
bear it. It was 1998 and people living with HIV had never had it better.
I first realised that these were the drugs' side effects one year later,
through an HIV community publication and not through my hospital. I understood
that what was happening to me was happening to other people as well, and
this gave me some
comfort. I was then able to raise these issues with my doctor, to describe my symptoms more accurately - I think even my body language had changed -
