Many HIV-infected manage to overcome the condition
On December 1, World AIDS Day, virtually all countries paid tribute to Rock Hudson, Brad Davis, Anthony Perkins, Robert Reed, Amanda Blake, Freddie Mercury, and almost 22 million others. By tradition, rallies were held near red-ribbon-shaped memorials. The rally participants lighted candles and pronounced the often-repeated but still significant words: life goes on, and the goal of humanity, if not to overcome, then at least to slow the spread of HIV.
Every day, the world has another 14,000 infected with HIV. The still ongoing year 2003 has increased the count by 3 million and claimed 5 million lives. Ukraine, which announced as recently as eighteen months ago that it had 36,000 HIV-positive persons, has now raised the figure to 60,000, while the WHO claims we have 400,000. At first glance, these figures and the fact that HIV has existed in Ukraine for sixteen years would seem to remove all blank spots on this issue. Yet, the situation is different. A poll conducted by the BBC World Service showed that half of all Ukrainians do not even know that AIDS means death.
Having rather a foggy idea of this disease in the 90% of instances when polled, they are first of all worried about their own financial welfare.
As the HIV/AIDS dates approach, one usually tends to diminish the threat and even claim that AIDS does not exist. Word has it that the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome diagnosed in 1981 by US Dr. Michael Gottlieb in his homosexual and drug addict patients strikingly resembles the description of such diseases as cancer, tuberculosis, and malaria. Now, too, some medical experts go on record saying that the true picture is far from the one being painted and the funds allocated for combating the virus exceed the need many times over. Nevertheless, it remains a fact that throughout the world, including Ukraine, HIV/AIDS ceases to be the lot of, so to speak, immoral individuals and becomes an infection anybody can catch. Psychologists call HIV the burnout syndrome. They say people with this diagnosis belong to the virus, not to themselves. The HIV-infected do not know how to suppress resentment toward the more fortunate. Once they know they are ill, they live awaiting death. Yet, things could be different. Very many HIV-infected display rare communicability and optimism. They are not against coming into contact with and even provoking you to ask delicate questions. Still, they are all particular about hiding their names. The HIV-infected say that what is written in the ID is a thing of the past. Now everything is different.
Olena turned 25 this year. She changed her identity two years ago after fleeing to Kyiv. She fled her village house without telling anybody goodbye. Local people were unaware of HIV and its origins, Olena says. All they knew was that only a fallen woman could be affected with it. As the media were actively explaining things about HIV, the village in fact pronounced an anathema on any individual thus diagnosed. Olena worked at a food store, and shoppers hurled accusations at her that they “have to go somewhere else for a loaf of bread.” They “could not take what is supposed to be food from the hands of a cursed woman.” Such comments dogged Olena everywhere. Neighbors hosed down the porch almost every hour and prayed to God that they be saved and the fallen one be punished. Coming to Olena’s rescue was out of the question. Her parents kept a strained silence: their only daughter has disgraced them. Meanwhile, the daughter had nobody to complain about. In the best traditions of soap operas, the vacation of the guy who promised a happy life in a place under the sun had long ended.
Olena remembers that in the first days after she knew the diagnosis, she was always haunted by one thought: why should she wait for death so long? She was thinking 24 hours a day about being doomed: this is no exaggeration, for she could not sleep at all at a certain period. The brain kept playing the record of her personal losses: nobody will love me, I’ll have no friends, job and, hence, money, I no longer have a home to come back to, and, the main thing, I have no strength to live on. “Maybe, this mood has greatly reduced my life span,” Olena says now. “When I came to Kyiv, I learned that the disease could develop twice as fast due to stress.”
She found encouragement in the capital and was assured that she was still at the dawn, rather than dusk, of her life. She was thus supported by the people who had experienced even more glaring reactions to their condition. For example, the collective in which Olena’s current friend worked called what smacks of Soviet-time Communist Party meetings. High on the meeting’s agenda was “amoral behavior of an employee who deserves strong censure.” Naturally, the meeting “solemnly” resolved to dismiss the employee and made such “friendly” comments as “we did not even guess to whom we have given shelter.”
“It is perhaps wrong,” Olena muses, “but I’ve bidden farewell to my relatives. That I have very little time left gives me an impulse. No, I don’t think I must try everything in life. Rather, I must try myself in everything.” Now Olena has begun writing poetry — not bad, incidentally. She understood she can be a leader, an organizer and an inspirer of ideas. “And I understood at last that I am a very strong and purposeful person, not a guilt-ridden girl who does not know what she wants in life — the image my parents created.”
Today, Olena sticks to a very tight, minute-by-minute, schedule. Formal contacts, training sessions, and presentations in the morning, an English language course in the afternoon, informal contacts in the evening, and sometimes poetry at night. Olena’s most cherished dream is to have a child. She is now seriously thinking of this after learning that the Global Fund is sponsoring free medicines to pregnant HIV-infected women (this means the child in fact stands a zero chance of getting HIV). In addition, she now knows by her own experience that an HIV-infected individual can live a full fledged life.
INCIDENTALLY
According to Inna Tovkach, deputy chief doctor at the Zhytomyr Oblast AIDS Prevention and Treatment Center, the number of the HIV-infected has increased by 62 people over the past six months, bringing the overall figure to 657 as of November 1. At the same time, three more residents of the oblast contracted AIDS, the total number being 61. 42 people have died since the beginning of this year. Almost 60% of the HIV-infected are young people aged between 20 and 29, mostly males. The most frequent way of transmitting this infection is injecting drugs, which affected 496 people. Still, Ms. Tovkach continues, sexually-related infection has recently been on the rise. In her opinion, the latter tendency was primarily caused by the low culture of sexual relations among drug abusers who either do not know about the necessity of using or do not want to use or have no money to buy prophylactics. Although the center gives them new syringes in exchange for used ones, only about ten persons a day come. Senior schoolchildren can attend a daily video lecture on the relationship between intimacy and AIDS hazards and on the ways of reducing the risk of being infected. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS has recently awarded the center a grant to procure special medicines for systematically employing the so-called antiretroviral therapy. A total 17 HIV and AIDS patients have been selected to be treated under this grant. In terms of medicine and sociology, they represent the category of so-called safe people, that is, those who have a good mind and conditions to be treated and follow the recommendations of doctors, Valery KOSTIUKEVYCH, The Day, reports.
