Iceland review - 2007, Page 47

ICELAND REVIEW 53
As president of the nation’s more than 300­strong AIDS organization,
Hauksson now devotes much of his life to edu cation and prevention
not just about HIV but also about all sexually transmitted diseases.
Every single ninth and tenth grader in the country has met with a
representative of the orga nization, and a few of them have even met
Anna, who spent a year in the schools educating young adults about
HIV and STDs, including chlamydia, which has been a massive
problem in Iceland in recent years. In 2005, 1,622 cases of chlamydia
were diagnosed, which translates to Iceland leading the Nordic nations
in the greatest number of cases per 100,000 inhabitants. If left un­
treated, chlamydia can lead to severe reproductive health problems.
Though Anna has felt very little discrimination in recent years, she
recalls a story from five years ago, which she now finds at once sad and
amusing. She and her current boyfriend were visiting a swimming
pool in the West Fjords. She reco gniz ed one of the women in the pool
who had gone to school with her sister and they had a few friends in
common. “When you come from a small place and, you know, it’s one
of these moments of clarity – she was looking at me with her jaw, her
mouth was agape, and instantly she knew. She recognized me and she
just knew [her HIV status],” says Anna, who takes a cocktail of nine
pills a day to keep the virus at bay. “All of a sudden she started rushing
out of the water, it was so crazy, rushing out of the water with this face
like she was saving her life or something. She panicked. I just don’t
think she knew any better, she just thought “AIDS, I have to get out of
the water.’”
Out of pure instinct – both to calm herself and to calm the other
woman – Anna swam to the edge of the pool near where the other
woman was sitting on a bench and struck up a conversation, not about
HIV, but about the friends they had in common. “That was my way of
getting out of this embar rassing situation,” says Anna. “Maybe it was
to calm myself, but also to show her, listen, I’m just a normal person.”
Several new drugs came along in 1996 that revolutionized mod­
ern HIV treatment worldwide. Once Anna started taking a
combination of the new drugs, she stopped drinking and began
to fully accept her status as a woman living with HIV, which
also meant adopting an entirely new outlook on her life. “It’s another
shock, accepting, oh my god, I will have a life, what am I going to do
with it?!” she laughs. “It’s like, shit, you’ve been throwing away every thing
because poor me wasn’t going to have a life.”
Anna and her former husband split amicably in 1998 when she moved
back to Iceland, and in 1999 she met her current boyfriend, who is not
HIV+, through mutual friends. She told him her status after several
weeks of battling the questions that any person, male or female, would
grapple with, but which Anna feels can be more acute with women.
“This is the experience with some of my friends who have this virus –
should I tell him or not, is he worth it, how long do you date a person
before you tell him, what if he goes away, and if he does, that’s one more
person who knows who doesn’t need to know,” she pauses. “There are
just endless questions when you’re a woman.”
Inevitably, another one of those questions, especially among women
with HIV, is about the possibility of having children. When she raised
the issue with her then­doctor, Haraldur Briem, he said it was her
“human right” to have a child. The odds were already against her with
one fallopian tube and two previous miscarriages, but after several
years and experi menting with several different methods, she became
one of around 15 women with HIV in Iceland to give birth.
Doctors haven’t always been advising HIV+ women to give birth,
including Briem. In the late 80s and early 90s, in fact, he advised HIV
women who got pregnant to have an abortion because the risk of
passing the virus along to the child was 30 percent. But the reality of
the situation changed as drug treatment improved throughout the 90s.
Now the risk is less than one percent when strictly following the advised
guide lines. Since breast­feeding is still not advised, her best friend, who
recently had a daughter, provided milk for Anna’s son for almost the first
three months.
No news from the doctor is good news. Anna’s strain of the virus is
almost always undetectable. Only twice or three times has the viral
load in her blood been above detectable levels, including once during
the first three months of her pregnancy. She and her doctor decided
that she would go off of her HIV medication for the first three months
to take extra precautionary measures for the fetus, and then go back on
it during the second trimester. Once she started taking the medication again,
the virus slid into the undetectable range again, where it remains now.
Meanwhile, her son gets bigger by the day as does the word count on
her master’s thesis. She hasn’t yet thought about how she’ll disclose the
news to him when he gets older, but Anna makes herself clear about
one thing. “My friends and family, they simply forget. They see me as
a healthy person, just as I have started to see myself. I really see my
future as an old woman somewhere.”