Last Wednesday I was standing in line at the sandwich counter in the small cafeteria by my office when my phone rang. It was my doctor. A week earlier I had blood drawn to check my T-Cell count and the results were abnormally low. My T-Cell count was 363 per microliter, healthy people have between 500 and 1500. My doctor spoke in a worried and irritated voice, he sounded like he didn't understand something and didn't want to say more than was necessary. "There's a possibility you've been infected with the HIV virus," he said. "I'd like you to come down and get tested as soon as you can."
This was the worst day I've ever had. Getting STD scares has become a relatively common experience. I remember talking to an older friend who marveled at how stressful it must be having a sex life in a world where HIV exists. He grew up in the sixties, a self-described sexual acrobat whose biggest concern was herpes and pregnancy. Having a potentially life-threatening consequence to sex was incomprehensible. I scoffed when he said this. Sex is no different than driving. No one marvels at how close to death they are when they merge onto a freeway. They buckle their seatbelts, turn their blinkers on, and check the rearview mirror.
When I hung up the phone, it seemed like I could feel the metal frame of a car crumpling in around me. I was dizzy and my head hurt. It felt like I had broken my nose against a dashboard in a cloud of shattering glass. It wasn't the idea that I'd been exposed to the possibility of HIV infection that scared me so much. It's hard to imagine being sexually active without at least wondering about it from time to time. Condoms break, or seem entirely besides the point in the heat of the moment. Getting a call from a panicked doctor with a concrete figure on a lab sheet pointing directly towards HIV infection is another thing entirely. This wasn't a guilt-ridden hunch about some Saturday night way back when, this was something tangible, in black and white.
I spent the rest of the in an andrenalized haze. My hands shook at the keyboard, I wrote without any understanding of the words I was stringing along. Questions started orbiting around in my head, trapped in some dark and nauseating gravity. Where could I have gotten HIV? Who should I tell? Could I have given it to anyone else? How do I tell my parents? How long can I live? What will my funeral be like? Am I going to wind up bankrupt paying for retroviral cocktails?
I looked at co-workers in the break room with a mix of greed and shame. I was suddenly envious of their normal, uninfected lives while feeling some subconscious mark as I refilled my water bottle at this sink. I wanted to vomit every time someone said hello. I wanted to blurt it out into people's faces. "How's it going?" they would ask. "Well, it looks like I'm dying. I have HIV, if you're wondering what seems different about me today."
I left work at 5:45 and immediately started calling friends, leaving a bunch of restrained messages about just wanting to say hello, got some kind of shitty news today so maybe when you get a chance give me a call back. My friend P was the first to call back. He walked me through all of the different things that could lead to a low T-Cell count; everything from leukemia to malnutrition and stress. My friend J, a licensed HIV counselor, called me back next and explained how unlikely it was that HIV was the cause given that I had tested negative in late August and my last real exposure was in the Spring. To have tested negative after 4 months and then to have the viral load increase so significantly that it could affect T-Cell counts in 6 weeks was highly unlikely.
As comforting as it was, I couldn't let go of the idea that I could be infected. Probabilities work for other people, but it was too much to happily assume everything was going to be okay based on some statistics that I was barely lucid enough to grasp in the first place. It's easy to be confident when you're life isn't hanging in the balance.
I was in a robbery once. I remember a young boy, eighteen or nineteen years old, walking towards me with a tech-9 pointed at my chest, looking right at me. Everything went white in my brain. I raised my hands up over my shoulders and looked back at him. My life was out of my control at that point. I remember not being able to look away from his eyes. There was nothing to say, I just stared at him with my hands up, overwhelmed, out of power, on the edge.
When the doctor called, I felt that same powerlessness. My life slipped right out of my hands and hung suspended in the distance between me and some future moment where my results would be disseminated. Positive. Negative.
I had blood drawn the next morning. I went into work late. I had a slight fever and chills from the sudden rush of anxiety, my eyes were dry and irritated. I kept imagining telling my parents that they would outlive me. I imagined my friends at fifty, living without me. I imagined the end: weak, struggling with barely contained illnesses, bedridden, broke, in some antiseptic hospital bed holding my mother's hand, unable to blow out the lone candle on my 40th birthday cupcake.
I decided not to tell my parents until I got the results. There were some people I could be vulnerable with, and some people I felt obligated to not fall apart to. That night my dad was coming through the city. He was going to a conference in the morning and was going to spend the night at my apartment so he wouldn't have to get up as early to make it to the city. He picked me up from work and we drove back into the city together, chatting about work, movies, politics. We went out for Vietnamese food. I asked him how his noodles were five times over the course of dinner. When the check came I opened my fortune cookie. It said I should write to an old friend I haven't spoken to in years. My stomach dropped, I looked at the floor wrestling off another wave of adrenaline. Even the fortune cookie seemed to understand that my premature death was imminent.
We walked the five blocks back to my apartment and I pulled out the guest mattress. My dad had been up early and his head was nodding down in sleep every few minutes sitting on the couch. I have a studio apartment so there was no point staying up if he was ready for bed, and I was exhausted. The night before I had tossed and turned, sweating through awful death and sex dreams. Going to sleep with my dad in the same room was a small relief. It reminded me of being a kid and nosing into my parents' bed some night when I was too scared to fall asleep. Even as a grown man there was still some superstitious lure to having a parent asleep a few feet away that made every overwhelming thought seem manageable. The night before I felt like I was alone and drowning. With my dad there, I felt safe, afloat in a boat at night, nearing some new shore.
I got my results back yesterday. I'm HIV negative.
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