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I don't know anyone personally, that I'm aware of. Last semester I took a class on HIV and Emerging Diseases, and a woman came to speak to us about HIV and AIDS, and prevention. She started to tell us a story about her friend, a woman who contracted HIV from her husband when they were trying to get pregnant. Before she married her husband, he'd been in and out of hospitals because of a mysterious illness no one could diagnose. It was the early 1980s, so no one really knew about HIV/AIDS, and there was no test for it. Eventually he started to feel better so they never thought anything about it. Five or six years later, the woman got pregnant, after years of trying. They were ecstatic. Soon after she found out she was pregnant, she went to donate blood. A few weeks later she got a letter in the mail telling her that her blood had tested positive for HIV. She had contracted it from her husband, who had contracted it in the 1970s during the one instance in which he experimented with IV drugs. Her daughter also became infected. Then she told us that the story wasn't about a friend...it was about her. Her husband died before their daughter was born, and her daughter died at the age of 7. Her friends disowned her and her neighbors tried to run her out of town when they found out she was HIV+. She's still doing well today, and no one really knows why - they suspect she's just one of those people whose immune system is good at fending off HIV's advances. She takes the drugs, but has to switch every year or two because their effectiveness wears off and the virus becomes resistant. It's really a matter of hoping that they can keep producing new drugs fast enough so that she won't run out of ones to take.
I still think about her. I started crying when she was talking, and afterwards I went to give her a hug and tell her how amazing she was, but the words just wouldn't come out right. I don't think I thought about anything else for the rest of the day. She's a beautiful, strong, healthy-looking woman, and you would never guess. But she's dying.
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