I suppose I haven’t put a post on here for a long time. I suppose I’ve just been busy, but also I was pretty sure that my account here had lapsed. Turned out it hasn’t. So, back to HIV and me. Recently, I have been baffling the medical community, and it hasn’t exactly been working to my advantage. Here’s a little run down of what’s been going on.
Being back in Hull, I’ve had the fun of transferring all my documents to the Hull clinic again, from the Leeds clinic where I was posted before. You’d have thought it would have been fairly easy. Email them through, maybe be primitive and fax them. But no, they had to go by post. And that would invariably taken a few days. So after a week of ringing back, I got a response from a particularly excitable employee by the name of Paul. Paul wanted to tell me that everything would be OK. Paul wanted to tell me all about HIV and that my files had been transferred and doesn’t the postal system try your patience sometime.
Paul ran me up a £10 phone bill. Cheers, Paul.
And so forty minutes on the phone, and all I had learned was they had got my paperwork and that Dr Kuchiamani wasn’t in today. That was a nice bit of conversation. And so, they day after my 20th birthday, I was dragged in for another series of blood tests. Of course, before the blood test, Kuchiamani wanted to ask me a few questions about my general health. It went more or less like this.
“Now, I’ve seen your paperwork and your CD4 seems to be quite good, and your viral load fairly low. I assume this all to be correct?”
“Yes, the results there are what I told you about a month ago.”
“Yes, I see. Now, let’s talk about the potential of seroconversion. I would assume you have seroconverted by now?” Have you had any of the following symptoms, do you know?”
“Go for it.”
“Have you had a cough at all, persistent and chesty?”
“No.”
“Have you had a fever or severe flu like symptoms that have lasted for around three days?”
“No.”
“Any skin rashes?”
“No.”
“I notice you have lost weight.”
“That was intentional to a point. I was working as a lab technician, I had a very active job which didn’t give me all that much time to sit down to a full dinner, and I had mononucleosis. So I would put the weight loss down to that, really.”
“I see.”
So have I seroconverted? Hell if I know, she didn’t seem to have much of an idea. She ran through a lot of possible symptoms I may have had, and I didn’t seem to have had any of them. And then I was whisked away into another room by a nurse who weighed me, calculated my BMI, and said that what I needed was buns. Lots of buns. But that’s the NHS for you.
So nevertheless, off I went into another room to have some bloods taken. 13 vials of blood, to be exact. And I hadn’t eaten anything that day, so I was sure it wasn’t going to go well. By vial number 7, I was still feeling OK. By number 9, I was starting to get a little bit dizzy. By 13, I had gone completely sodding blind and felt like I was about to die, so the nurse ran out into the waiting area to consult with the others. There, my friend was waiting for me, and heard this wonderful bit of dialogue.
“Diane, are you going to eat all of that cake?”
“I… I suppose not.”
“Great!”
And so I was presented with a slab of carrot cake and a cup of tea with rather pushy instructions to “eat that, drink that, and stay right still”. So I did, and within a few minutes, I was being ushered to the reception desk to make some more appointments. For one of them, I’m not allowed to eat for 24 hour, then I’m having a blood test. When I regain my sight, I’ll let you know how it goes.
Oh, it’s fun, what with this and exams, but I’ll cope.
PosLife