"I felt very reassured"

I contracted HIV, and spent 13 years on ARVs before stopping them. I became extremely ill, and was hospitalised (including Intensive care unit). This was my first visit back to Sidwell St Clinic since 2020.

I was emotional thinking about going for my appointment. Lots of mixed feelings about the consequences of my mistake in stopping taking the ARVs. My care and attention in RDE Hosp for 3 weeks had been excellent, and it carried on in such a vein seeing Abbey in the clinic ...my first outpatient appointment since hospital discharge.

Seemed another era since my last appointment with Abbey before my disappearance off their radar. She was welcoming and really concerned how I was, not at all critical of my behaviour in abandoning her, the clinic, then finally the ARVs. And she stated herself, to assure me, that the clinic had no judgement of me.

I had a lot of questions and queries about my treatments, how my immunity had got so depleted, what my overall prognosis could be...to what extent I can regain the fitness I felt before I stopped the ARVs.... and she let me work my way through them all...there was no sense of time pressure.

And Abbey expanded in detail on a lot of the topics relevant to my future wellbeing...ones I brought up, and ones needing to be discussed.

I felt very reassured.

Abbey has seen so many people living with HIV, she speaks with authority gained from tuning into their experiences, and her feeling the pulse of the evolvement of HIV protocols, and treatments . She did not pull any wool over my eyes. She did not flinch in conveying the seriousness of my actions, how I have endangered my life in choosing to stop the ARVs and diminishing my immune system to bottom of the scale. I accept what I did, and feel somehow sheepish and humbled by it. And sort of bemused that my life path has taken these turns....

She brought up the elephant in the room...as to whether I might stop ARVs again! Essentially I stopped them end of 2023 according to my beliefs developed slowly by slowly from 2020 onwards. Now having had my glaring experience of great deterioration of health, I see that once a person starts taking ARVs they are committed/contracted for life...no deviation is at all advisable...it will not end well.

So to wrap up, I felt relieved to be back under the wings of the clinic again (the process of deciding to stop ARVs is a solitary and lonely one).

It also felt like a return to business as usual...with updated modifications of treatment explained well by Abbey, my bloods being taken and sent off, next appointment talked of, going away with quite a few months worth of medications. I felt bolstered by seeing Abbey. The quiet degree of vulnerability I was carrying over from hospital into convalescence rather evaporated, and I felt a sense of being given permission to get on with my life...albeit in a paced and patient way, as realistically my recovery could take months. But to get on with it!. Thanks Abbey