World AIDS Day was yesterday and over the course of the day, I thought about how HIV/AIDS have affected my life. It wasn’t until today that I actually got a chance to get anything on paper.
When I was in middle school my uncle, who lived with my family, started to go blind. It started slowly at first, and my mother and all the other adults attributed his weakened eye sight to getting older. At the time, my uncle must have been in his mid- 40’s and bad eyes run in the family, so no one was surprised that he started needing reading glasses. Except the reading glasses didn’t work. In fact, nothing worked.
Finally, after much coaxing, cajoling and outright coercing my mother got my uncle into the car and over to Duke for a physical, including an eye exam. They returned with thick-ass glasses that my siblings and I made fun of.
It wasn’t until a week or so later that my mom and my uncle apparently went back to the doctor to get the results of the physical. They, of course, didn’t say anything to us kids. And I wouldn’t have suspected a thing, if I hadn’t caught my uncle silently crying on our couch before my mom made him leave the room.
A few weeks (or months) later mama took me out for a walk (we still take each other for walks when we have “controversial” aka bad news to share). It was then that she told me that my uncle was HIV positive and that the disease was what caused him to lose his vision. I reacted badly and said some pretty hurtful things. (Give me a break, I was 11) After my mother gave me the look (you know the look), she informed me that he was still family and we would support and take care of him. She told me that we had to be more careful about washing our hands, and dealing with other body fluids. My uncle was prescribed what looked like oodles of colorful pills to take every day and he had to stop smoking. He continued to live with us for a little while after that, until again I caught him crying.
That time, mom just called my siblings and me into the family room and told all of us that my uncle now had AIDS. He moved into a hospice for AIDS patients soon after. My uncle lived in that home for at least a year or more (it all gets blurry to me). We visited him at least once a week, and got to watch him and a whole bunch of other AIDS victims die. His fight wasn’t an easy one, and towards the end my mother stopped taking me and the other kids to visit him. She thought it was too disturbing.
Other than her weekly visits, I only remember a few times when my mother was called to her brother’s bedside. One was the night that he went completely blind and found himself alone, staring into utter blackness, another happened when one of the other men in the home died (who had come to live there shortly after my uncle) and the last occurred on the night that he died.
My mother recounted the story (or at least his speculation) on how my uncle contracted HIV, but that story doesn’t really matter here. She also told me of conversations that they had discussed his live and regrets. She says that he would often dissect his life to see where he went wrong.
I always thought that that was the saddest part of my uncle’s short battle with HIV and AIDS. Even in the end, he equated his being gay with having AIDS. He didn’t “come out of the closet until the beginning of the end and it seems that he still had problems with who he was and how he lived his life. This, of course, was at least partly to blame on his upbringing, his relationships, and the shame that was still associated with being a gay man in the 1990’s. I wondered why he never got tested before. Was it shame? Fear? Lack of education?
My life is riddled with people I wish I could have gotten to know better over the years. People whose stories I wish I could have recorded in some way. My uncle is one of them.
I don’t really know how telling this story is related to the overall mission of this blog, but what I do know is that other people like my uncle exist. People who feel isolated. People who have health problems they don’t know about. I also know that where we live and how we live affect our outcomes; social, political, economic, educational and health. Complete communities, which encompass all areas of our lives, support residents allowing them to have full, rich lives. And we can’t have complete communities without adequate local, affordable healthcare.
I would like to think that the conditions under which my uncle went untested for AIDS for many years (and would have continued to, had he not had those vision problems) no longer exist but I know too well that they do. AIDS isn’t like cancer in that early detection saves lives (At least I don’t think so) but with the right medication, he would have lived longer, giving me time to grow up and take an interest in him and his life.
Furthermore, who knows how things would be different if whomever my uncle contracted the disease from had been educated about the sexual risks they were taking, and had used condoms. Now scale that up and think about all the other people who could be saved with proper sex education and access to free condoms.
Luckily, in the county where I grew up, things have changed for the better. At the local health department, students could get free condoms, birth control and STD testing. I hope adults without insurance can get the same benefits.
Unfortunately, other areas aren’t as progressive as my hometown. Even in the city of Atlanta, population 537,958, finding a health department that does STD testing can be a miserable experience. Just this summer, I wanted to have a physical without health insurance. The only option I could find was a Planned Parenthood, if the City of Atlanta has health departments, their web presence is deplorable. At the local Planned Parenthood, guess who I shared the waiting room with on the day of my appointment? Young gay men and teenage girls. And if the looks on their faces were any indication, they weren’t getting any good news. It just breaks my heart because it could easily be much different.
Some would say it is unpractical and certainly unprofitable to have plentiful local healthcare in easily accessible areas in and around our neighborhoods. But we already know the difference it makes when folks have easy access to healthy food and more education. (We get healthier, smarter folks) In the same way, having near-by healthcare options and comprehensive sex education can also improve the quality of life of residents.
