Vials

So now I’m going to conclude my HIV diagnosis story. I guess it’s taken me the better part of four months to get there because I wasn’t really finished dealing with it. I think I needed to really finish processing what it meant to me before I could put it down on paper, well technicological paper.

The next morning Jaime and I went to my favorite brunch place, Red Eye Café, in Montclair, NJ. I ordered eggs Benedict with pork belly. Eggs Benedict is my go to comfort breakfast and I needed some comfort that morning. I was still barely more than a zombie at this point, so I’m sure adequate social functioning was not happening.

After an awesome meal we went to my favorite park in Montclair (clearly today was a day of favorites), had some cigarettes, and shot the breeze while eating Bavarian cream donuts. We then went and picked up my friend Jarek from the bus stop. He somehow felt compelled to come in from New York City to help comfort me at this terrible time. Now Jarek is this super anal, super organized, kind of neurotic person who just makes you hate yourself because YOU are a lazy Son of a Bitch, and of course he pulled no strings here. He was on a mission to find me a doctor and get the ball rolling. I was not in a place to get the ball rolling. I was still continually praying to Jesus on the regular that this was all just a terrible, terrible nightmare Finding a doctor and talking about a cocktail of toxic pharmaceuticals was the last thing on my mind, but that was the beauty of Jarek he was always prepared to make you face things that were intimidating and most likely overwhelming, he was quite the sobering friend.

Anyway, we picked Jarek up from the park and ride and as he came Jaime had to leave to go back to Philly and her marathon nursing program. Jarek and I spent the day schlepping to Central Jersey to pick up my Z-pack from Nelson’s house and then into the city we went to take Jarek home. I then went food shopping with him at Whole Foods, said goodbye to Jarek, packed up my car with groceries, and began the drive home through the Lincoln Tunnel. This was the first moment that I was completely alone since I was diagnosed and I could not handle the silence, and then Sam Smith came on and I was a goner.

There are songs that without fail will leave you feeling vulnerable and teary eyed. Sam Smith has a song, Like I Can, that automatically makes me well a little. The fact that Sam Smith is a bonafide homosexual and I can relate to pretty much all his songs made this song even harder to listen to. Being diagnosed with HIV made me question whether or not I would ever find love, more than I already do, and this song was not helping at all at the moment. So alone in my car, listening to Sam Smith, while driving through the Lincoln Tunnel I began crying, sobbing even. I cried tears for me, for all the obstacles I would have to face, and the judgment I would face from others. It took about two seconds before I was using my car phone to find someone who was available to hang out with me, and in the meantime I went home, got drunk, and watched the Big C. My coworker Nikki came over later and spent some time with me, and life continued to get a little easier, and that was the end of day 2, and I, my friends, was still standing.

Over the next few days I found out I had health insurance, booked an appointment with a doctor Jarek found me, and then having to call the office and admit to them that I was diagnosed with HIV in an effort to get an earlier appointment. I mean I was diagnosed with a potentially life threatening disease, I should be accommodated. Once I uttered the words HIV the doors opened and I was given an appointment for the next day.

On Wednesday morning I went in to the see the doctor and although he was very experienced with LGBT issues I felt like not too much was explained to me. We went through my entire sex history, and he probed my sex life for intimate tid-bits. Top, bottom? Protection? Whips, chains? Anal probes? Size of anal probes? You get the picture. It was clear that this was a gay doctor’s office once the doctor’s medical assistant, Ryan, made his appearance. He was wearing trendy New Balance sneakers, a flashy button-down shirt that looked like it came from A Night at the Roxbury and heavily whiskered medium-washed blue jeans. I was kind of appalled at this get-up. Not only was it not professional, but it wasn’t even cute. I’m pretty sure my deceased grandfather could have put together a cuter outfit consisting of pieces all from Old Navy.

After all the assessing was done it was time for the real fun to begin! They needed to take 15 vials of blood. As I sat there with the IV in my arm and watching vial after vial being filled and my head feeling lighter and lighter the magnitude of the situation really began to sink in, not to mention that after all these vials were filled Ryan was going to need to swab and scrape the interior of my rectum for HPV and the Clap. After all the probing was done I put my clothes back on and went back to my life.

On Friday I got a call from Planned Parenthood that they had the results of my HIV blood test and that I needed to come in to get them. I was pissed at this point because why would I need to go and get re-diagnosed all over again. I begrudgingly left work and headed over, but when I arrived I was greeted with the news that my blood test was negative! Negative!!!!! I hugged the NP that relayed this news and had she been hotter I probably would have made out with her a bit. I really didn’t know how to handle this news. Did this mean I was negative? Which test had been wrong? Planned Parenthood left me with the advice that I was most likely negative, but should use condoms during sex and get retested in three months. This seemed like less than stellar advice at the time. I was completely numb and didn’t know what to do. I then called my doctors office and told Ryan the news. My doctor called me back quickly, and told me that a negative blood test was a good sign, but I was far from out of the woods.

The next morning I received an email from my doctor reporting that my viral load came back and the virus was undetectable in my body. This is when things really started to brighten up. We still needed a few tests to come back to be certain that I had received a false positive reading the rapid test, but things were definitely looking up.

It was upon hearing this news that I decided to get ridiculously intoxicated on gin and lemonade to celebrate. I had my good friend Peter come over to keep me company and entertain my drunk ass. Unfortunately, he was forced to put up with my drunken antics, like watching me strip on my back deck while lotioning my genitals and watching episode upon episode of Girls, a show that he now thoroughly despises. Later in the evening my friend Todd joined us and we were going to go out and grab a bite to eat. I suggested we go to this little restaurant and bar in Montclair, Egan and Sons. It’s one of my all-time favorites, mostly for the Carrera marble countertops and sexy bartenders. I could do without the mostly white, straight, and often douchey and entitled college crowd, but it’s a cross Egan and Sons patrons have to bare.

Upon arrival at Egan’s I was given a t-shirt to wear because men aren’t allowed to wear tank tops. So now I was stuck toting my ass around in an oversized, white Hanes T-shirt with a huge Bud, Miller, Coors, insert another white trash watery beer bottle on it. I was mortified. I pride myself in the way that I dress and now not only was I intensely intoxicated, and still severely fragile from my potential HIV diagnosis, but I was forced to wear a hideous t-shirt. Egan’s was just asking for it. However, I held it together and attempted to be as nice as humanly possible to our pig-faced trollop of a waitress. After dinner Peter bid Todd and I adieu, and Todd and I went to the city to gay bar hop. I don’t really remember anything from that night and I’m ok with it. Life, in general, was pretty blurry for a few weeks, and not remembering my moments of psychological fragility is ok with me.

Fast forward a week and a half I met with my new doctor to go over my lab results and obtain a full physical. I was super anxious to hear his thoughts and get the final yay or nay on my status, but first I had to sit through a gamete of prods and pressures to hit the finish line. The worst of all these tests was the Spirometry test. This test assesses your lung function and capacity by having you breathe out into a tube. I sucked at this test and could not do it properly. I could tell that Ryan was becoming irked by this and politely apologized, and his response (classically gay) was “ Oh, I’m not mad at you. It’s just that there are other things I NEED to be doing, other than watch you breathe.” Thanks a lot douchebag, maybe you should wear tighter white denim to work next time?

This test indicated, assuming I did it right, that I had the lungs of a 68 year old. This seemed pretty unlikely because even though I smoke cigarettes I try to combat this with routine cardiovascular exercise, so I'm just blaming Ryan for skewed results.
After Ryan huffed out of the room the doctor came in to assess me in my very fashionable blue paper gown. He listened to my heart, looked in my ears and then it was time to look in my eyes. Now I have awful vision, like without any kind of corrective lens I'm technically legally blind (I'm still waiting on my seeing eye dog), so the doctor was having a hard time seeing into my eyeball. It was during this examination that his genitals brushed against my thigh and well he was aroused. Either that or he had a cigar in his pocket. I didn't really know what to do at this point. I mean I was attracted to him, I mean I routinely went for the "Daddy" type, but this was my doctor and I didn't even know his favorite color, so I just choked it up to another hilarious life experience.

After the examination the doctor took me into a separate room and we were going to redo the rapid test. It was the only test that I had yet to test negative to, and I guess in many way this would finalize my negativity. The Little Imp, Ryan, came in and administered the test, and what seemed like a billion years later my doctor came in to give me the good news that it too came back negative. It was an amazing moment and I felt like so much weight was lifted off my shoulders. I spent the car ride home calling my friends and telling them the good news.

This experience was a huge emotional rollercoaster and something that I will never forget. It changed the way that I think and feel about HIV/AIDS, casual sex, and the way I treat stigmatized people. I definitely think harder about who I sleep with and value sex more than I used too. I realized I didn't really value sex at all as of the summer of 2014, and that was something my younger self would have been disappointed in. With all that being said I am four months out from this false positive and I'm happy, healthy, and definitely wiser. I don't know that I'd want to do it again, but I can say for sure that I've learned from it.