Enjoy life!
Take control!
Stop HIV/AIDS!

A World AIDS Day reflection
A Speech for the Victorian Parliamentary observation of World AIDS Day, 2008
1 December 2008

It has been said that in the moments before death, your life flashes before you: the triumphs, the trials and the tragedies of your past. When you are diagnosed with HIV, a similar thing happens, except it’s not the past that you see – it’s the future.

The future triumphs that you’ll miss: the grand schemes that will never come to fruition; the grandchildren you will never see; even the Grand Final that Richmond will never, ever win.

The future trials loom large on your horizon: illness; hospitals; suffering; sharing the news with loved ones.

And the future tragedies: opportunities; loves; careers; even life itself cut short.

In the moment of clarity at diagnosis – for me it happened in August 1995 – the idea of this year’s World AIDS Day theme would have sounded ludicrous, the worst sort of denial of reality.

Enjoy life!

What life? It had just been ripped away by those blunt words: I’m sorry, but the test is positive.

Take control!

How? In 1995, as now, the virus was incurable. In my body, in Australia, all over the world, HIV was manifestly out of control.

Stop HIV/AIDS!

Too late! At 34, I had as much chance of stopping the tide as I did of stopping HIV/AIDS.

Now, as I enter my 14^th year of living with this virus, and celebrate the 10th anniversary of being diagnosed with AIDS, I can appreciate this year’s theme not as a denial of reality, but as a challenging call to courage and action to me, to all people living with HIV, and to the whole Australian community.

For me, this message has a new resonance, particularly because the early death predicted for me in 1995 has not eventuated.

The other truism about the clarity you achieve with a brush with death is that each moment of life afterwards becomes more precious. Although I have not always been lucky with my health over the last 13 years, even the bad days have been precious because they were days I never expected to have.

Enjoying life is no great ask when every day is an unexpected gift.

Another truism with HIV is that if you don’t take control of the virus, then it will take control of you. Some of the worst days of living with HIV are the days when exercising control is a chore, because of illness, drug side effects, the demands of complex medical treatment, and the mental and spiritual toll of living with chronic illness.

But this control is much easier now than it was in the past. Today I take two pills to control HIV, as opposed to the 18 I was taking in 1997.

Other aspects of control have become easier too. When the science of anti-retroviral treatment was new, I felt compelled to know the details of the classes of drugs I was taking: nucleotide and nucleoside analogue reverse transcriptase inhibitors; non-nucleoside analogue reverse transcriptase inhibitors; protease inhibitors.

These days, things are simpler: I take the blue one in the morning, and the yellow one at night.

Perhaps it is a sign of the advancing old age I never expected to have, that I no longer need to master the details to feel in control.

The joys and trials of this journey have made the third part of this year’s World AIDS Day message much more important to me. Stop HIV/AIDS. Nobody should have to live with this virus.

I had a leap of World-AIDS-Day joy to hear that with the combined efforts of the Minister’s department and our many excellent community organisations like PLWHA Victoria and the Victorian AIDS Council, we have succeeded this year in reducing the number of new infections in Victoria for the first time this millennium.

As a state, we are taking control and perhaps stopping HIV/AIDS. This gives me another reason to continue to enjoy life.

Thank you.