This past week, while accompanying a nurse on adherence home visits in an effort to better understand the HIV/AIDS experience, I came across a situation that made me pause to reconsider my own life. I met a young woman, 21 years old just like me, who is HIV positive. She contracted the disease from her parents, but she is the only one of her siblings to be HIV positive. In the course of my research I've come across many HIV positive patients, but meeting this woman reinforced the reality of the disease. Like me she is not married and doesn't have children, but instead of planning a carefree future, she must consider how HIV will affect her life and how she can best manage it. Now, I can't comment on this woman's state of mind. I have no idea if she has come to terms with her disease, whether it dictates how she proceeds with her life, or how it might limit her. But I can, to some extent, consider what such a diagnosis would do to me. At 21, with so much of life still ahead of me, it would be absolutely devastating to receive such news. I don't believe it's possible to go on with the same life that you lived before the diagnosis--HIV/AIDS is too big of a disease to simply push to the back of your mind. In the United States, where the prevalence of HIV is less that 1% and being positive no longer constitutes a death sentence, I think it might be easier to live with HIV. But here in Africa, Uganda specifically, where the prevalence is back above 6% and only a tiny fraction of those in need receive ARVs, there is not the same positive outlook for all HIV patients.
What really makes me pause over this woman's story is how she contracted HIV. This is not a case of a woman being promiscuous and having multiple partners or of someone who is reckless and doesn't get tested. Instead, she received HIV from her parents at birth, something completely out of her control and left to fate. Perhaps, on the one hand, it's better to know that she had nothing to do with her status--perhaps that alleviates guilt that others might feel over unsafe behavior. But on the other hand, I know that such a situation would make me feel powerless. How could my parents, the people who were supposed to protect me, give me such a life sentence? I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for this woman to come to terms with what her disease meant for the rest of her life.
Ultimately, seeing what kind of an effect HIV can have on all portions of the population gave me serious perspective on my own life. This could happen to me. Perhaps not in quite the same way, since i didn't contract HIV from my parents, but I could go out and get the disease in a different way. It could drastically alter the course of my future. Despite the advances of modern medicine, there is still no cure for HIV/AIDS and I would have to live the rest of my life knowing that. I think that many of us at a young age feel that we're invincible--that nothing bad will happen to us. My time in Uganda, however, has shown me how wrong that assumption can be. I've seen children, teenagers, and young adults all HIV positive and dealing with that reality. Although this might sound cliche, I will leave Uganda a bit more conscious of how often we take life for granted, even though it's incredibly precious. I am more thankful than ever to be a healthy 21 year old who is not faced with such a life-altering diagnosis. HIV/AIDS can happen to all of us and it's up to us to fight the climbing prevalence of HIV and protect our lives.
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