Claire is a fake name but the woman is real, a 52-year-old grandmother.
She lives in a Charlotte, N.C., apartment with two fluffy cats, dozens of family photos framed in silver and three bottles of pills that keep her HIV infection from progressing to AIDS.
She’s unwilling to be identified–worried that the stigma still attached to the disease will hurt her family or jeopardize her job–but she wants other women to avoid the mistakes she made.
“I don’t fit the stereotype,” said Claire, relaxing in an overstuffed chair in her airy living room. “I’m middle-aged. . . . I’m heterosexual. I was not a drug user. I contracted the infection through heterosexual sex with someone who had been my partner, well, it’s been 14 years now.”
The news that she was HIV positive came as a surprise, but not a shock. Claire had been tested several times, knowing that the man she loved was not always faithful, and that he sometimes used drugs. Once, she pushed him to wear condoms during sexual intercourse. But he refused. He said it wasn’t normal. And she did not insist.
When her test came back positive in May 1997, she blamed herself.
“I take responsibility for what’s happened to me,” she said later. “You go out and meet some nice man who’s educated and has a good job. You just don’t think of the risks. And I think we’re a little embarrassed, at our age, to bring up things like (condoms). . . . At least in my situation, someone shows some interest in you, maybe there’s a chance for a little romance in your life. It’s probably the last thing you want to talk about. But it could cost you your life.”
Claire grew up in the Midwest in the ’50s, married young, without finishing college, and had two kids. They settled in Charlotte in 1972. But by 1983, she was divorced and dating again.
She fell in love with a man who was handsome and successful, a sales representative with “more money than he knew what to do with.”
He traveled a lot and took her on beach vacations and ski trips all over the country. He didn’t live in Charlotte; they spent weekends together, often working on projects around his house. When business forced him to move to another state for a few years, he sometimes flew her to see him on a few hours notice. He bought her younger daughter a car and paid for part of her college education.
He was Claire’s only lover. But she knew that she wasn’t his only lover.
“We weren’t married,” she said. “I wanted to desperately. But he said he wasn’t ever going to get married again.”
Claire knew of at least two other women in his life. And she knew that his “dabbling recreationally in drugs” had evolved into something more serious. By the early 1990s, he was sometimes out of touch for several days, which was unusual. When he finally called, he would admit that he had been getting high on crack cocaine with people he didn’t even know.
Claire sat down with him one night for a serious talk.
“I said, `I love you but I’m not willing to die for you.’ . . . He assured me he was not having unprotected sex with anybody.”
Over the years, Claire occasionally got tested for HIV. “I was tested five or six times. Each time it would come back negative. I would breathe this big sigh of relief and say, `It’s not going to happen to me.’
“Then again, there was this little voice in the back of my head. I knew it was going to happen to me. I didn’t know when, but I knew. As long as I kept seeing this man and having unprotected sex with him.”
In May 1997, her gynecologist called her at work with the bad news. He expressed his shock and promised to help her get an appointment with a specialist as soon as possible.
Claire felt numb. She drove home and immediately called her lover. They had not talked for several months–they had argued about his drug use and broken up for a while. She quickly got to the point.
“I’m HIV positive.”
When he didn’t respond, she added: “You know there’s nobody else I could have gotten it from.”
She urged him to get tested. They didn’t talk long. He seemed stunned.
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Claire then called her younger daughter, who lived nearby. She came over quickly, worried by the sound of urgency in her mother’s voice. At the news, the daughter became hysterical, wailing and crying, and they just held each other.
“I did all the talking,” Claire recalled. “I just kept saying, `It doesn’t mean I’m going to die.’ . . . It was the worst moment of the illness, the worst moment of my life.”
Claire quickly got help from an AIDS specialist, Dr. Jim Horton, who started her on two antiviral drugs, Zerit and Epivir, and a protease inhibitor, Viracept, that has kept her healthy.
Except for having a bad reaction to one drug she no longer takes, she has been well enough to hold a full-time job at a Charlotte firm. She takes 17 pills a day, including a multivitamin, extra vitamin C and calcium — some with breakfast, some with dinner.
“I’m tired of taking all those pills. I can see why people just give up. But there are a lot more complicated regimens out there. You can’t skip a dose. It’s just part of your life, and it gets real old.”
It’s also expensive. Her three anti-AIDS drugs cost $800 a month, of which health insurance pays 70 percent. Every three months, she gets about $500 worth of lab work, only partly paid for by insurance. She tells the clerk at the pharmacy, “I’m going to die owing you money.”
Eventually, Claire’s lover also tested HIV positive and started taking antiviral drugs.
“I was just flat-out stupid,” Claire’s lover says now. “I’ve got two fatal diseases. I’ve got HIV and I’m a drug addict. I’m working hard at both.”
They continue to see each other. Ironically, when they have sex, they now use condoms, at their doctors’ advice. The hope is to avoid the possibility that either will infect the other with a strain of virus that has become drug-resistant.
“You can re-infect each other and make it worse,” Claire’s lover said. “I’ve kind of stopped talking and started listening.”