The Fear, Hope of Women With HIV

The message from the second Los Angeles conference on Women and HIV was an alarm: 1. Women make up the fastest-growing number of AIDS cases.

2. The World Health Organization predicts that by the year 2000, there will be more HIV-positive women than HIV-positive men.

Humanizing those statistics, four courageous women stood up and told of their personal struggles. One was Dawn (her middle name), 31, a musician. She is pretty and blond--and she is HIV positive and symptomatic.

Dawn believes she contracted the virus through intravenous drug use while living in New York in 1980; she tested positive in 1988. She is speaking about it publicly for the first time and she is edgy. She’d like to come out--”It is not morally correct to stay silent anymore”--but is afraid for her career.

“I got tested because I was about to get married and I thought it was a good thing to do. (My fiance) ended up marrying me anyway, and remains negative . . .

“I had a lot of red flags. I didn’t pay attention to them because they just don’t let women know what these red flags are. I had shingles in 1984, I had oral thrush, I had vaginitis, vaginosis, skin disorders, weird Pap smears. I asked doctors over and over again, ‘Should I have an AIDS test?’ ‘No, no, no. You’re not that kind of girl.’ . . .

“Living with HIV, you live with unknown deadlines, which is the hardest part of all. You don’t know anything and that’s probably where the biggest fear comes in. A constant issue is, ‘What will happen to me? What will occur? What will I look like?’ . . .

“(Last) February, I got very ill. I was in bed for seven months. No one knew what was wrong with me. I was hospitalized twice. Every test in the book was done. . . . I lost about a third of the hair on my head. I lost weight. I couldn’t lift a fork to my mouth. . . .

“The disease is so strange; it just flips . . . here I was in March not being able to turn the clicker on for the TV and here I am today being able to speak here. . . .

“I see myself as a long-term survivor of HIV. I think there are a few things that I can contribute to that. Probably the most important is having a good relationship with my doctor. I’m a bitch to my doctor. I have his home phone number and I call him if I don’t feel good because this is my life and I’m not willing to let anyone else have the power over it. . . .

“My husband is my buddy. He is there with me. It doesn’t seem to be an issue with us. Everything is like in a normal marriage. . . .

“Even when you feel hopeless, when you feel helpless with HIV, there’s always a part of me that just feels a little hope. And I think that is terribly, terribly significant in getting you through this. . . .

“I am not a victim of HIV. Nor will I ever, ever, live my life as one. I’m living the best life that I can. In the end, I think that’s the best that any of us can ask for. . . .”