from then on.
theme
from then on. You literally become like a social leper. In that moment, I was aware that my life would never be the same. From that day on, I knew I would be victimized, because ultimately, it doesn’t matter what I believe as much as what the people around me believe. In a sense, I had lost my freedom, all because of a lie.”
In the other room, his parents were being told the same story, and advised to ‘comfort your son’. Then they were brought into the room with Frank, where the doctor was spending a lot of time testing Frank’s lymph nodes, trying to find some symptom of the HIV infection.
“But I had no symptoms whatsoever, and I was never sick. And I wasn’t even sure what antibodies were being measured in this test; they could be antibodies to anything. ‘Who knows?’ I asked the doctor. He just shook his head. Looking back, I was on the right track, even as a seventeen-year-old!”
“My mom asked the doctor the same questions I did. She also thought that having the antibodies to a virus meant that you were immune from a specific disease. But these doctors and nurses acted more like priests and nuns, coming from a religious faith and fervor more than from a scientific basis. They were just more or less following orders and acting irrationally. They weren’t thinking. They weren’t looking at the person in front of them to see if I was healthy. They were simply programmed like robots, convinced that HIV was a deadly killer virus.”
Frank felt a mixture of fear, anger, bewilderment, frustration and disbelief. But more than anything, he felt that the doctor was wrong. “It just didn’t make any sense. This is a disease where cells are supposed to be dying, but retroviruses like HIV don’t kill cells. Besides, hemophiliacs like me, who essentially inject other peoples’ blood all the time, have a higher chance of having antibodies to lots of things that can create a false positive reaction to the HIV blood test. Everything about it was absurd. I didn’t