Iceland review - 2007, Blaðsíða 47

Iceland review - 2007, Blaðsíða 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.”
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