HIV destroyed my body's ability to defend itself from disease, an ability that it had developed over the course of my entire life. By the time the doctors diagnosed me, every random bacterium, virus, and fungal spore had an odds-on chance of killing me.
Some of them tried.
Pneumonia, fungal meningitis. The latter almost finished me off by causing two small strokes in my brain. I would have died, too, if I hadn't been lucky enough to have a complete Circle of Willis - a circular path of blood vessels in the brain - that kept enough blood flowing to the blocked area to keep me alive.
Even after I pulled through and started ART, I got an onset of molluscum contagiosum around my cock and balls - normally this is easily resisted, but it took months to clear. Then an old friend returned from childhood: chicken pox, in the form of shingles, activated because my immune system started to recover. That was misery squared for about three weeks.
My CD4 count inched up slooooooowly, and I had to take prophylactic doses of antifungals and antibiotics until the count reached around 200. It's now around 300 after three years, where it ought to be at least 500, and it may never get that high again.
I started on Atripla, then Triumeq, and now Genvoya. Every. Single. Day. Atripla sucked because it had to be taken at the same time each day, coordinated with meals, so there were times when I could, and could not, eat. It also made me gain weight, and shifted that weight to unattractive areas of my body. It has taken a long time, a complete change in my lifestyle, and a heartbreaking change of diet to alter that.
Most recently, my doctor informed me that, as a result of my medication, I have developed a low-grade case of diabetes. Yep, you heard that right - meds-induced diabetes.
Why am I bringing all this up? Because these are the consequences.
I'm alive. I'm relatively healthy. I'm not sick, my viral load is undetectable, my chance of infecting someone else with HIV is very, very low, and my chance of getting another opportunistic infection is also very low as long as I take my HIV meds daily. But that doesn't mean I don't have to pay a price for my barebacking. From now on, I have to live very carefully. Until science catches up with this enemy virus, I have to live with diabetes. I have to watch what I eat, knowing that badly prepared food could do far worse than give me a bellyache. I have to work extra hard to keep my body from changing shape into something I don't want to look at.
And I have to live with the understanding that my life expectancy, even with these miracle meds, is my mid-70s. That's at least 10 years less than I should have had. Now, I never particularly wanted to live to be an 80-year-old, so that's no great loss for me, but in a general sense, is the feeling of a raw cock up your ass worth ten years of your life?
I can't answer that for you, because I can't answer that for me. Even after everything I've said above, I'm still not sorry for the day I took 34 loads in my ass. I wish I could do it again tomorrow, and the day after that. Being that kind of bottom completes me. I've accepted that part of the reason I'm here is to serve other men in just that way, and it gives me great joy every time a man experiences his climax inside me. I feel as though what I lose in quantity of life I perhaps gain in quality of life at that moment.
I only wish I had more opportunity to give.
But maybe that's what these HIV meds do, after all - not more opportunity to give the virus, but to give ourselves.
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