bearbandit

Note: this will not hsppen to you, even though it happened to me and a number of my friends. When Norvir was first introduced it was in such overdose that it caused almost total loss of libido. When I came of it I was just beginning to communicate with my dick when my partner fell ill. Didn't feel it right to go out whoring, so I nursed him four years till his death, after which I decided to take some time out to get my head together. It didn't help in the meantime to get diabetes and have it go untreated for so long (we all know what it does to the nerves down there - that's why viagra came on the market). Yes, being versatile (though I didn't through all this time) gives me a fall-back position. I went between ten and eleven years without any sex whatsoever, which is why I'm working as hard as I can to make up for that missing decade.

oh shit - full blown.... I sure knows my place baas

I still list myself as versatile, because that's where my head is. However I can't overlook the effects of my illness: my legs (and indeed entire skeletal structure) ain't what they used to be. Bottoming is less stressful and nearly as much fun (thank fuck I had a fallback position!) But that's just for fucking, for the rest, where I possibly have got piggier, I'd guess I've increased my top quotient.

I'd be more inclined to call it good luck. I used coconut oil as a lube in the seventies and didn't get significantly fewer STIs, including HIV. However it's an amazing lube as it's liquid at body temperature (the downside being that it's absorbed very quickly). Much as I like coconut based eastern cuisine, I think I'd barf at having to eat an entire spoonful.

Correction to the file I've been sending out: the bit about 1:20 refers to time in the microwave on full power d'oh! (well, you gotta have one ambiguous bit)

In one of my stories the bottom is gut punched several times at the start. I was in a bottom phase and sent the whole story to a potential top, who thoroughly enjoyed it. When we met up fairly early on in the scene he gut punched me several times - a definite turn-on and an addition to my top repertoire...

Not necessarily low testosterone: when I was on the original Norvir it was famous for its mental castration effect (not even a hard on in the night and when the odd wet dream happened it was such a surprise I thought I'd pissed myself). I insisted on testosterone testing and that came back normal. I'd just rather have a cup of tea than sex - that's how interested I was. I even stopped writing porn... There can be any number of reasons for low libido and low testosterone is only one of them (but one worth checking out)

Would someone closer to WI give his ass a good slapping for that joke? ;-)

In the interests of not turning the board into Ladies Home Journal, I've sent you the recipe privately. The important thing about it is that it contains a lot of fibre, can be made into individual portions, freezes well and it's damn good for you: it's what you'd eat if you were vegetarian and working on muscle gain. It's one of the recipes I use to help against HIV (though obviously, it's not a cure: just part of my healthy eating plan). Anyone else want the recipe PM me.

There's a lot to be said for vegetarian food: all you need to know is how long food takes to pass through your system, a figure that differs for everyone. If I know I'm going to get fucked around 10 o'clock tomorrow night, I'd have a large bowl of muesli about midnight tonight (about two third of an individual Japanese rice bowl's worth, or more if I'm hungry, with as much milk as I want). Some time the next morning it all comes out, leaving nothing behind it. I do a nut roast that's so emphatic in its effect that it's known as colonic irrigation. Any douching is more for cosmetic effect than anything else...

The cocksucking risk is low - low enough to have been promoted as an alternative to ass-fucking, "because there are enzymes in saliva that destroy HIV". I'm not the only one in the UK to wonder if the risk has been inflated by men who can't bring themselves to admit to having anal sex and claim to be anal virgins "so I must have caught it from sucking cock". Whaddaya know - cocksucking is suddenly respectable! ;-) From a UK perspective, that clinic gets paid every time someone has any sort of test there, so it's in their interest to big up the risks. The UK system means a budget for this, a budget for that, but at least we know where we stand, and a good manager can always get extra money for his/her department...

#8 Personally speaking, in those photos you have the look of "he'll be fucking hot when he grow up"...

It's quite possible that he's had time to learn a bit. He might have seroconverted since your last conversation. Any number of reasons for his behaviour, as to what to do about it, I allow one mistake: Was there any form of apology in his message? If there was I'd give him a cautious "yes", but would be prepared for him to waste his last chance. If there wasn't, I'd say something like "when I have and explanation and apology for your behaviour last time, I'll think about it."

No, not Mr Benson (though that's the book of his that everyone remembers). As I remember Mr Benson's basic premise was that he was introducing a young man who didn't always take Mr Benson's advice to leather. I remember the t-shirts with the slogan Looking for Mr Benson, some with a question mark at the end, a delightful way of changing the entire meaning of a phrase with one piece of punctuation. If the book I'm thinking of was John Preston it must have been in the Master series. I'm not completely unpacked from moving last year, but I'm fairly sure that I have the complete Master series somewhere...

I gave someone a copy of one of my stories and he refers to it as "the gift that keeps on giving"

Bad joke in this context... unless you really want HIV and no treatment options. It's a nasty messy way to go. If you're talking in a sexual context, of course it's a good thing: sex seems to improve when the bottom looks the top in the eye and says "fuckin' make me"

That's the risk: it's harder even to remember to take preventative medicine than therapeutic medicine. I was in hospital when news of Truvada for PrEP came through and I asked the HIV team what they thought, and their replies were non-adherence ending in infection and resistant virus. But it proved that it can be done. Not so sure what you mean by a crutch... But you have to look at the fact that it's reckoned in London condoms prevented 40% of potential infections in the late eighties. At best they're only 96% effective - about the same as having an undetectable viral load. Nothing is 100% effective in this game except of course for wanking in front of the video. Personally, much as I enjoy my porn collection I like to share it with my mates...

Didn't John Preston write a novel about this?

Not sure if I would were I negative, but if you're not looking to be pozzed, it could, with the right monitoring, be a good idea. Good news I just found is that tenofovir has been reformulated to reduce its toxicity so maybe some of my Casssandra-like warnings about it will become redundant when the new Truvada comes on the market. Beyond that a load is a load is a load.

Sorry for my lack of clarity: I used to take tenofovir and FTC and different times of day in order to manage the side effects better and so tend to think of them separately (I'm still taking FTC, along with darunavir/ritonavir and raltegravir). I was essentially taking Truvada, but its components instead of the single pill. I don't doubt the efficacy of Truvada for PrEP, but I think the protocols for managing any combination containing tenofovir, in the light of what we're seeing here, aren't sufficient.

Two things worry me in particular: the first is the three month spacing of kidney work-ups. My January workup showed nothing unusual. I didn't get my April results because I was busy hallucinating (lack of potassium in my brain) in a trauma ward having wrecked £2000 worth of bike and snapped my softened ankle in the process. Three months between workups is too long: you don't notice the side effects coming on and they can come on fast. The second is that the side effects of tenofovir are not necessarily reversible on cessation. If they were I wouldn't be taking all these supplements, walking with a stick and so on. I'm not saying don't, but I am saying for fuck's sake be careful.

Does anyone have a table to convert US gauges into UK gauges? We use millimeters here and I've never understood the US system... Thanks in advance. Ah! Struck lucky with different search terms... 16g 1.2mm 3/64" 14g 1.6mm 1/16" 12g 2mm 5/64" 10g 2.4mm 3/32" 8g 3.2mm 1/8" 6g 4mm 5/32" 4g 5mm 3/16" 2g 6mm 1/4" 0g 8mm 5/16" 00g 9mm to 10mm 3/8" 11mm 7/16" 13mm 1/2" 14mm 9/16" 16mm 5/8" 19mm 3/4" 22mm 7/8" 25mm 1" 26.9mm 1-1/16" 28.5mm 1-1/8" 30.1mm 1-3/16" 31.7mm 1-1/4" 33.3mm 1-5/16" 34.9mm 1-3/8" 36.5mm 1-7/16" 38.1mm 1-1/2" 39.6mm 1-9/16" 41.2mm 1-5/8" 44.4mm 1-3/4" 47.6mm 1-7/8" 51mm 2"

The first paragraph only goes as far as counselling to encourage daily dosing, while the second goes on to imply good adherence, which in the UK is gauged at 97% - missing one pill per month. I don't think you are misreading it as different foods affect absorption. The usual window for effective absorption of most HIV drugs is one or two hours (ie take it at nine and the next dose must come between seven and eleven to maintain active levels in the blood, even though the half life is longer than that). I recently saw similar juggling of figures about the effectiveness of condoms, normally quoted at 96%, whereas a new report was of the opinion that condoms prevented about 40% of infections in the late eighties. Sounds like garbage, but... At a recent HIV training weekend I was on, working in teams we had to list, in correct order, the twenty steps needed for successful condom usage. Nobody could; and that's stone cold sober working mode rather than desperate "c'mon man, I gotta have it" mode. Side effects: while it's true that embitracine (FTC) has a relatively low side effect profile, tenofovir can be vicious and its damage permanent. There are a number of minerals and vitamins my kidneys piss away instead of recycling and despite massive doses of calcium and vitamin D, I've been unable to go back to the weights and still walk very slowly with a stick. We're finding these effects as little as three to six years after starting tenofovir as a therapeutic drug. I think it best to look at Truvada PrEP as proof that PrEP is possible, but these are the wrong drugs, and more needs to be done on the psychology of PrEP especially. If I were neg, given the choice between PrEP and wrapping it, I'd go for the rubber or take my chances without drugs. I'll bet the drug companies have noticed that their therapeutic licences for FTC and tenofovir, as well as Truvada, are about to run out. How nice for them to have to organise a new patent for an old drug...

Poor adherence to HIV drugs is definitely a form of suicide. The social work team I was with twenty-odd years ago certainly saw it as such... There might have been only one or two drugs (AZT and ddI) then, but you could always do what an ex of mine did and stop taking antibiotics for an aids-related condition, or simply refuse treatment as my partner did...

Excellent post MMM, but could I add a little to it? Of the components of Stribild, elvitegravir is new (same class as raltegravir, which I'm finding to be pretty trouble free). Cobicistat is a new booster drug, eventually intended, I believe to replace ritonovir. Emtricitabine is a close relative of 3TC which was available in the mid nineties - 3TC was originally only available to people who were on the nevirapine trial, which is how I encountered it and tenofovir is, in my opinion, due for retirement. Tenofovir can cause permanent kidney damage - I've gone from throwing around a 600cc city bike on country roads to needing a walking stick in eighteen months (they tell me that my broken ankle might never heal), as well as needing numerous mineral and vitamin supplements. It's no fun cleaning the limescale off a PA every other week! If someone goes for this drug it's essential that their kidney function be monitored on a regular (every 3 months would be my best guess). If things go wrong, the convenience of on drugs could be replaced by taking twelve drugs a day. In the UK we're seeing no real gender difference between people having adverse reactions to tenofovir, even though in later life osteopenia and osteoporosis tend to affect women more than men. Onset of adverse affects seems to come between three and six years of starting tenofovir. Because tenofovir is a component of truvada, the other component (FTC) tends to get the blame too, but it's definitely tenofovir. So I'd say to anyone taking stribild (or tenofovir) that they should have several full kidney work-ups per year. Tenofovir's side effects also hurt, and not in a good way.