My life with HIV
healthcare workers of any changes in your body.
‘Longed to have a child’
With my CD4 count on the rise, I decided to try for another baby. I so longed to have a child. After consulting my gynaecologist, I was able to follow some procedures and conceive…I gave birth to my son on 9 October 2007. It was not an easy pregnancy, he was born prematurely, but now he’s one hyperactive little boy. Although he is still very young, he has noticed that mommy takes pills at night and in the morning, and whenever he sees my pills, he says, ‘Mommy, take your pills!’ He knows that I have to do this, although he doesn’t know why. Once he is big enough and is able to understand, I will start reading to him from children’s books on HIV. I want to be the one to explain the whole situation to him, before anyone else does, so that he’s able to deal with it. I’ve also kept a copy of his results from when he was six weeks and then six months old, so that I’ll be able to say, ‘Through taking my treatment I was able to protect you from the virus that I have’ and encourage him to stay negative throughout his life.”
Something is wrong.
Born and raised in Boksburg, Gauteng, I initially learned that something might be wrong with my health during her first pregnancy at age 18. I went to the doctor… and he said he was going to do a series of blood tests…The results came back in an envelope that said ‘confidential’… The doctor never told me the results, he just said they showed that I had a rare illness, and he was going to prescribe some tablets for me…I was admitted into a private hospital and given blue and white tablets, and I remember the nurses asking me if I knew what those tablets were for. I took that treatment for two weeks, and delivered my late son. My second child became ill at the age of two months, and when she was about four months the doctors wanted to test her for HIV…I gave consent, and the results came back positive. That was hard, because at that time there was not much information about HIV. All I knew was that Aids kills. One would see these horrible pictures of frail people with HIV on TV. I didn’t know that there was treatment, I didn’t know where one could find it…I did not know what was going on. My daughter passed away in October 2002, and I got tested… The results confirmed that I was HIV-positive.
told my mom, and asked her to tell my other siblings. It was a tough year. There were questions: ‘Why our baby sister?’ And at times I would say, ‘Why me?’ And my mom said, ‘If not you, then who? You just have to accept it and keep taking the treatment that was prescribed.’ She nursed me, and I went through a phase of dementia.
Resistance to ARVs
While all this was happening I moved to Cape Town, my CD4 count was 3. It went up to 11, but through my treatment literacy training I realised that I may have become resistant to Efavirenz, the ARV I was taking. I think this happened because I had received no adherence counselling or discussion about ARVs when I was first prescribed them in 2002. When the doctor gave them to me, he didn’t describe what they were for or that they were a lifelong treatment. So when I started feeling better, I stopped taking them... But then I became very sick by the end of 2003, and re-started my ARVs at the hospice. When I told my doctor that I thought I was resistant to Efavirenz in 2005, my regimen changed to 3TC, AZT and Caletra. After starting regimen two, my CD4 count went up and my viral load was undetectable. Being treatment-literate helps the patient understand what the drugs are doing in their body, and how to identify signs and symptoms of resistance and opportunistic infections. This knowledge enables you to notify
‘Live like anybody else’
HIV never stopped me. I’ve taken it as a chronic illness, and managed to live my life like anybody else… I’m now super healthy, I go to the gym… My life is just blossoming, and I’ve continued the career plans that I had before I was diagnosed with HIV.
Disclosing my status
It took me a while to tell anyone about my status. I did not share it with anyone, until I became very, very sick at the end of 2003. I then
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