Results tagged “AIDS” from A Swede in SF

Yesterday I decided to get out in the sun and sit and read.

I decided eventually to return to one of my favourite gems of this city: the National AIDS Memorial Grove. I hadn't been there in some months, maybe a year, but it always strikes me as a such a tranquil and centering place. And it was just as nice this time with beautiful flowers, the maple trees. I just have to remember this place more often than I do.

In these times when the California economy struggles and the Governator wants to slash the HIV preventive money and money for the medications (ADAP) to support the people that cannot afford their HIV medications, the urgency of this memorial grove feels even more important. To some of my close friends in this city the removal of ADAP is a potential death sentence.

Today, my thoughts go to friends and former patients that are living with the disease. I also get reminded of the men that I interviewed for my pilot study during the past year and the experience they had when HIV/AIDS hit the gay areas of San Francisco and New York City.

On a day like this I cannot help to think that HIV has been one "part" of my (sex) life from the age of 12 (well, 9 if one thinks of the first publications). From even starting thinking about other men, the reality of HIV has been around. The scare tactics have left me with an in-erasable awareness of a potential third party being involved.

In today's SF Chronicle there is an article about "Ward 86" that was the first ward for patients with AIDS in San Francisco that opened at the San Francisco General 25 years ago. It reminds me of the ward 53 at South Hospital in Stockholm that was closed after the introduction of the new, anti-retroviral combination treatments.

The treatments has allowed HIV/AIDS to be illnesses also for the older adult. Some of the problems regarding that was described in an article in the New York Times three weeks ago: "Speaking Out for a Group Once Unheard-Of: Aging With AIDS". That the medical community recognizes this - albeit gradually - is evident in that NIH has several research grants now that deal with the medical care for the older, HIV-infected adult.