@danijelr15:
@darn46:
get more meds and live a healthy lifestyle
Yeah, go ahead. Damage your liver with heavy drugs. Cause even more side effects from pills that'll make you dizzy, cause diarrhea and whatnot. Give yourself more years of already fucked up life by feeding companies with your money bills and statistics. Ignorance is bliss Kilo22.
This is a fair argument for being careful, but some of us were careful and are still poz. Condoms used correctly are something like 99% effective; if they were 100% effective I wouldn't have the knowledge and experience to write this post.
Once you are poz, however, the options are taking the drugs and dying horribly in as few as 10 years.
The effects of being poz? Dealing with fuckwits who try to slut-shame you (because OBVIOUSLY if you're poz you're a slut and a whore who barebacks with strangers). Dealing with idiot bug-chasers who think they want it. (When I run into these, I ask a single question: how much would my monthly meds cost without insurance? If they can't answer that – and to date no bug chaser has even guessed over 30% of the figure -- then I give them a variant of this lecture.) The question of whether to put "poz" in online profiles or not -- if you don't then you have to figure out how to bring it up, and if you do, then you still have to figure out how to bring it up because most people don't read profiles. (Worst date evar: things had been going well, we seemed pretty compatible, one thing was leading to another, we were heading back to his place, I said "we should stop for condoms," he said, "why? I'm clean," and I said, "didn't you read my profile? I'm poz," and suddenly it was like I had said, "I'm a leper with hantavirus and Ebola" -- he wouldn't come within 5 feet of me, let alone touch me.) And when you're dating other poz guys? Most clueless guys think that once you're poz you can just bareback with abandon. But in reality you get to discuss strains and medications, because if you have different strains or he's on Truvada and you're on Atripla then it's even more critical to use condoms, because the nature of the disease is that your personal strain slowly becomes resistant to whichever medication you're on.
The state of HIV/AIDS research is such that there's a fair chance that something not related to HIV will be what kills me in the end, and current medications (while they still have side effects: the dizziness on Atripla goes away after a couple weeks of taking it, but the extremely vivid dreams never do) are good enough that, aside from taking 1 or 2 pills a day, being poz has very negative physical and physiological impact. But the negative social impact is going to take much longer to go away.