Living with a person who has HIV

At first when you find out that someone so close to you has the HIV virus, the world comes to a complete stop. Sadness and uncertainty take over, you try to hold back the tears, but you cannot.

The person feels totally uncomfortable, since he is going to deal with this disease for the rest of his life and has already assumed it. But instead of giving them strength, we end up passing on all our frustration and helplessness to them. It's the wrong way to act, but that's what happened in my family.

Some cried and cursed God for such injustice. It was assumed that this person had never been promiscuous, on the contrary, it was the first time he had had a sentimental relationship.

That is to say, she was a virgin until that moment, so the news was even more difficult to digest. For all of us, those infected were people who had a very active sex life and of course went from bed to bed. So it was as if life kicked us in the face, showing us that anyone can get infected. From there things got very difficult....

HIV/AIDS denialism

Have you ever heard of or heard anyone refer to this subject. Well, I will tell you that I did not know about the existence of denialism, until that person close to me began to be informed and to believe in the fallacies of this group. They claim that AIDS does not exist or more clearly it does exist, although according to them it does not cause the disease.

The hard part was to see how he refused any kind of treatment, he didn't trust traditional medicine. None of us could convince him otherwise, so we ended up giving up. Little by little time went by and this person began to weaken, to such an extent that he lost a lot of weight powerfully. In addition, his love life was totally deteriorated.

Can you live with someone like that and not get infected?

Of course it is, HIV/AIDS is not as easily spread as is popularly thought. I admit that reading about this disease is not the same as living with someone who already has it in their body.

I also felt fear at the beginning, since there is always the fear of sharing the same bathroom or if he gets hurt I can get infected with blood. These are quite valid doubts which should be answered.

Most of us already know that it is transmitted sexually, through blood and from mother to child.

But in my case, I wanted to know if the relative who lived with me could infect me by a non-sexual route. I checked with a doctor and he told me that there was no possibility.

• If you sneeze, you are not in danger

• If you share a bathroom, there is also no chance. Urine, feces or sweat are not contagious.

• If the person touches my pet and I pet it too, nothing will happen.

• If a mosquito suddenly arrives and bites the infected person, don't worry. It only infects humans, the mosquito does not reproduce the disease.

She was much calmer after that, but she was still worried about her health. Every day he looked worse and his body was visibly attacked by this disease. Then one Tuesday morning, while we were going to buy the vegetables for the week, he had a seizure and fell to the ground, losing consciousness. I screamed for help and some people took us to the hospital. When we arrived, the paramedics told me that he was very skinny and one of them just lifted him off the stretcher like a child. When he woke up he couldn't speak properly and the nurses thought he was mentally ill, I told them no.

In the end, after spending some time in the hospital and a lot of problems in between. He decided to undergo the treatment, reluctantly of course.

Today it has been 3 years and he has gone from 41 kilos to 62. He also realized that he was totally wrong to believe in denialism and thanks God that he survived.

In this case the difficult part of living with this person was to see how he was destroying himself. He was very lucky, he did not contract any serious opportunistic diseases unlike others.

I do not mention in this publication who he is or his name, because it is not my business.

Cover image by Pixabay user padrinan

Publication translated with Deepl translator