SHARED by TOM
ANYONE
“I used to have AIDS.” I look forward to the day when anyone can say those words.
“I used to have HIV.” Wouldn’t it be great to hear someone say that and actually believe them, to know that it was possible.
I used to have AIDS. I used to have six months, maybe, to live. I don’t know many people who can say that, but I can. My doctor told me so in September 1983, days before my twenty-fifth birthday. And my doctor was a friend, he wouldn’t lie to me.
The week before we had been joking with another friend, a surgeon, as they were removing a cyst from my collarbone.
“Does this hurt, Princess?”
“Baby, Tom’s just a baby...”
“It hurts when I carry books in my backpack,” I said.
“You just want another scar to show off in the locker room.”
The jokes went on something like that for a few minutes, then an uncharacteristic quiet came over the doctors. They weren’t cutting anymore, they were stitching up. When they were done closing up and I had my shirt back on, they showed me a glass dish that held something that looked like a bloody, dented ping pong ball.
“Eww... What is THAT?” I asked.
“It’s a lymph node,” said Doctor 1.
“We need to send it out for biopsy,” said Doctor 2.
Fast forward a week and I’m in Doctor 1’s office with Doctor 2. I have questions.
“It’s Kaposi’s Sarcoma... in your lymph...”
“So, AIDS?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“We’ll have to run tests, get you checked out by some specialists, scans...” Doctor 2 paused and looked me in the eyes.
“Don’t look at me like that... Tom?”
Doctor 1 shakes his head and murmurs, “Six months.”
My lover and I cried that night. All night until we finally fell asleep at dawn in each others arms on the floor in the bay of our living room with his cat, Odin. We talked, too. We had been together just two and a half years. I was finishing the last credits I needed for a Bachelors Degree in English, tutoring graduate students on computerizing their theses, and waiting tables at Wickline’s on Halsted Street, just south of Sidetrack. We loved each other. We had a good life. And we started making plans to protect it.
I would declare a second major in writing for TV and radio so I could keep my student health insurance. Quit smoking, my lover insisted. Meat was out and exercise was increased. I started therapy at the campus mental health services clinic and learned to love the way the young intern assigned to me would try to hide his horror as I told him how it felt emotionally to have AIDS. How it was fouling up my marriage. How it made me shake with rage until my muscles ached. How I couldn’t tell anyone, because I didn’t want my family, my friends, total strangers looking at me and seeing AIDS.
Well, we told Bob Wickline, because we both worked in his restaurant. We didn’t know what a waiter with AIDS would do to a popular restaurant’s business, but Bob wouldn’t hear of letting me quit. We remained friends until he died of AIDS years later.
Fast forward a year and a half to the third week of March, 1985. I am still dying of AIDS according to the doctors who can’t believe how good my lab results are every three months. I’m twenty-six years old and in the best shape of my life, but always aware that the cancer could surge at any time. To that end I am at Doctor 1’s office (again) bleeding for lab tests. It’s routine, I’m in and out fast.
A week later, Doctor 1 calls and leaves a message on my answering machine asking me to come in and give another sample.
“Shit!” I thought. I had been dreading this day. The day my lab results started slipping. I went in and bled again.
A week later, Doctor 1 called and asked me to come to his office.
When I got there he explained that they had run my blood through the new HIV test, and I was negative. Both times. And they’d run the biopsy slides past two more pathologists. Not Kaposi’s. A benign, stress-related tumor.
It was all a mistake. Could have happened to anyone.
My year and a half of having AIDS was over at last. All I had to show for it was a few scars, including some that I still show off in the locker room. My lover and I tried re-sparking our sex life, but it was not the same. We were not the same. We were stronger. Activists and advocates. We were friends and loyal and still are. We lost innocence, but we had so many friends who had lost their lives, so we knew we were luckier than anyone. But with a little luck and planning, maybe someday anyone will be able to say, “I used to have AIDS.”