The day the numbers stopped being just numbers

Today someone really close to me was diagnosed with HIV.

It was a day like any other off day. I’d spent the day seeking solace from the weather in my room and was nursing a cup of tea and thinking of resigning to my bed when I hear a knock on my door. On the other side was the person that I will call Spencer. “Give me a hug, Dineo,” Spencer says as she walks into my room. I give her a hug and we sit down on my bed. This happens at least every other night, so when she begins speaking, I have no idea what she’s about to say.

“I was in Pretoria today,” Spencer begins. She tells me of taking tests in order to join the military. She says she had to take an aptitude test, a urine test, and many other tests. She says it in her normal Spencer way and I laugh along with her at all the right spots. And then she says something else:

Spencer: And I had to take an HIV test…

Me: Oh, really? I guess that’s logical considering every other test they made you take.

Spencer: Yeah, the last time I was tested was in September and I’ve been with the same guy since then so I thought it was a mistake when they told me I was positive.

Me: …..

What can I say? She didn’t say it in alarm. She even laughed a little while she said it. I was confused. I waited for a punch line for a moment but none came. She went on after a moment when I couldn’t think anything to say. Surely, it was a mistake and it was cleared up, given the way she announced it. So I continued to wait for the mistake that would unfold, everyone would laugh, Spencer would be relieved, then she would come home to Pankop and tell me this story of how she was HIV positive for a few minutes.

But when she continued, that was not the story she told.

Instead, she told me that the nurse who had taken the test sat her down and asked her about her love life. She said that she had only been with two men and that she used protection. She said the nurse gave her some papers and advised her to have a lab test to be certain. Spencer was confused and in a state of denial when she walked out of the nurses office.

A girl about her age, who had been before her in the line waiting for the nurse, had told her of her promiscuous ways. She said she had slept with many men and never had used protection. “Ah, I don’t really care. I make the men I’m with withdraw (the African term for pulling out) so I won’t get infected,” she had told Spencer less than fifteen minutes before. When she left the office before Spencer went in, she bragged about being negative.

And now Spencer sat beside her, a minute after being told that she’s positive, and endured more sex stories from this girl. “I couldn’t take it, Dineo!” she tells me now. She says the girl asked for her results and Spencer told her. A brave move, I think. The girl stayed quiet for a moment, Spencer tells me, but then she made up her mind that Spencer was lying and told Spencer that she should be on Generations. “You’re such an actor!” the girl proclaimed and though Spencer says she tried repeatedly to tell her the truth, Spencer failed to get through to her.

I try to ask her what the nurse said to her; I asked her how she feels now, what she did when she left the office. I didn’t want to pry, but I was confused and concerned at how unemotional she seemed by everything. But she told me she cried. She told me she ended up yelling at the sex-driven girl and when she was hit on later at the taxi rank by a stranger on her way home, she had gone off on him, “I’m positive! Do you still think I’m beautiful?” She says she felt like it was written all over her, like a bright neon arrow was following her around atop her head stating her status, “HIV Positive. Stay Away.”

I begin to find my words when I realize the truth myself. I tell her I’m sorry. I say that she’s young and that there are so many things to help her cope with this. I tell her that she can still do all the things she wanted to do in life, before she knew. She can live still.

I’m saying all this, yet, I’m scared for her. She’s 19 and the closest South African to me, literally and figuratively. She hasn’t even lived yet. She hasn’t been to college; she hasn’t traveled outside the immediate area. And she’s still so pretty and full of life. I’m scared by the facts that I know all too well. I don’t want to scare her. I think back to the conversation we had on Sunday when we were talking about marriage and the future. She wants kids, she wants to get married. And, she’s been telling me since March, when I met her, that she wants to study in America.

“I can’t go to America anymore,” she says as her eyes well up with tears.

I know why she says this and though I try to ignore the image in my head of that immigration form that you have to fill out when you enter the country with its seemingly innocent question, “Do you have an illness of significant public health concern?” I remember the Soul City (a night time drama dealing with HIV) episode where a high school senior gets diagnosed with HIV and is therefore denied a student visa into the U.S. I know that things are changing in America, and that now HIV-positive people are able to get a 30-day visitor visa, but student visas? Maybe that would be stretching it. Even now, all the information I see online says that student visas aren’t granted to those living with HIV.

(Get more information about different countries’ HIV restrictions here: http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/104722)

Despite everything, she amazes me. I wonder how she got so much courage so quickly. I know that I would be a ball in my bed if I were told such news. I wouldn’t see the light of day for a week and would not speak to anyone until I have mourned and would definitely not be brave enough to tell the sex-driven ignorant stranger next to me the truth. I would probably kick her instead. Of course, this is coming from me, a person who can make something trivial seem tragic.

But not Spencer. It’s been less than 6 hours since she found out and she’s already told her friends, her boyfriend (who still won’t admit to cheating), her mother, and me. She worries about what her sister who will say. “She’ll yell at me,” Spencer says. “All she’ll talk to me about is sex. She’ll want to know why I’ve been sleeping around.” She says her boyfriend doesn’t want to get tested. She thinks he already knows and just never told her.

Undeterred by her crap-ass boyfriend, and even more amazingly, she tells me she wants to continue talking about it to people. She says she wants to help me develop my life skills program I’m presenting to the local schools and speak to the students about HIV. She wants to show them that it happens to people like them. She says she never listened to the people that talked to her when she was still in school. She says the severity of the epidemic didn’t register to her coming from an old woman, an outsider, but she says, it might if she is able to go and show them that it happens to pretty, young, smart girls too. I agree. I can tell these teens all the facts, and though I’m a little bit of a celebrity in my Itty-Bitty Village, I’m not infected; I’m an outsider. But, maybe they’ll listen to her. I hope they listen to her. She may be the best tool in my tool box, if she’s ready and willing.

Despite everything, she’s still upbeat whilst talking to me. She looks in the mirror a couple of times during our talk and says, “I don’t look any different….” I know it’s still hitting her, slowly. Her CD4 count is high still and she’s healthy, but how long will that last?

Throughout it all, I stay optimistic and try to assure her that there’s so much more hope than there was ten years ago. Optimism is a new trend for the African me who has been a perpetual party pooper since landing in South Africa, but what other option is there? Before she leaves she tells me that from now on, she’ll count her years: One year with HIV, two years with HIV…and as I begin to lose my brief visit with optimism, she smiles and says, “Maybe they will find a cure.”

“I hope so,” I tell her. I hope so.