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Edited on Wed May-31-06 10:01 AM by nealmhughes
We know that everyone who has AIDS is HIV positive. We know that isolated HIV will destroy CD-4 cells in vitro. We know that HAART will reduce the HIV count to nondetectable from amazingly high levels and the CD-4 counts will trend towards "normal". Unfortunately, the HIV drop is more or less geometric while the CD 4 restoration rate is arithmetic. We know that HIV will make a person in severe affection turn into a babbling idiot open to opportunistic infections likely to kill one. When I write "We," I mean myself and my physicians at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. From an HIV level of 150,000 and a CD4 count of 85 and early stage dementia, loss of 25 pounds and severe disconnect to reality in the late Fall of 1984 to regaining my weight, no more dementia, but some shortterm memory loss, back to my fighting weight and no detectsable HIV level and a CD4 count of over 300 in less than a year's worth of HAART. I was poised on the edge of the volcano that leads to Hell. I slid down it and confronted the Three-Headed Dog Cerebus. His three heads are named Confusion, Despair and Death. I spat in all six eyes and clawed my way back out of the crater and am on my way back onto level ground. HIV-denialists, I will cry at your funerals. I want to live. I was just 45 a month ago...and while my career is ruined and probably never to be regained, I have had a stroke that makes me a one-armed leper, and have no money to my name -- I have my family and my real friends and my dogs and Nature...all thanks to modern medical science and my own stubborness and refusal to submit. I will no longe react, but act. I will take my 3 pills a day and type with my left hand and I will be a witness, not a bitter person cowering in the corner wondering "Why me?" or claiming "Conspiracy!"
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