There are many things a HIV diagnosis does to you. First, it makes you pay morbid and obsessive attention to your body. You begin to examine every part more critically and extensively, the way a first-time mother examines her newborn with prying eyes. When you step into the bathroom, the moment your clothes are off, you stare long and hard at your frame in the mirror. You gaze at your collar bones and wonder if they were always this visible or if the virus had eaten so deep at your being that your bones are starting to jut out to ask for help.

Next, you check your weight more often, and every gram you lose triggers a wave of panic attacks and anxiety. Will people notice the weight loss? Will they know you have HIV by merely looking at you? Whatever happened to HIV not ‘showing on the face’? When a boil grows out on your foreskin, you believe AIDS has come for you. When you cough three times in a row, you immediately  fear that tuberculosis has just moved into your lungs on a Lamborghini. God forbid you wake up tired or feeling fatigued with a headache and a body that seems unable to do anything at all. It is certain that is the day Mr. AIDS will take your life. It doesn’t matter that your viral load is down or that your CD4 cells have increased, paranoia will remain with you. It will seep into your moments of happiness and sour it or exacerbate your anxieties and make you feel dead while you are still breathing. And even when you try not to think too much about HIV, there is always someone -a pastor, a motivational speaker or just an ignorant fellow who will use your condition as a punchline to inspire others – Thank god for your life; you are not sick with cancer or HIV.   HIV changes you a lot. And I know this because this is my fifth year of fighting this scourge. My life has changed in ways I never imagined. This is my story or, at least, fragments of it. 

Year 1 – June 2017. Discovery

There are many places I would expect to be in June, in Lagos. Tarkwa bay with its sea-weed ravaged shoreline and rainwater-muddied beach, ICM – the unofficial queer conglomeration site of Lagos (but do not tell anyone I told you this) or Lekki- where we all go to take pictures at some high-class restaurant which we then upload on Instagram, always mindful to tag the location. Lagos University Teaching Hospital, LUTH is not somewhere that would cross my mind to visit in June, or anytime of the year for that matter. I had no business with that human abattoir, but here I was. 

When you show up to the small clinic in your street for the 3rd time in 6 weeks with malaria-like symptoms accompanied by persistent diarrhea and warts, chances are that the doctor would begin evaluating your condition beyond just malaria. Dr Ademola did and that is why I am here, in this sordid human abattoir just 3 days to my 22nd birthday, sitting opposite a wide-eyed counselor on a washed-out purple turtle-neck sweater. 

“When was the last time you had sex?” She did not raise her head to look at me, she continued fiddling through her phone, scrolling from Pastor Chris’ Facebook Page to Craze Clown’s IG page with a wry grin.  

“Ummm, about 6 weeks ago,” I muttered, trying to decide if what I had with John in his room amounted to sex.

“Do you have any discharge around your penis?” 

“No.”

This time she raised her head to look at me. She did not say it, but I could read it on her face: another young patient.

“Peter. I want you to know that irrespective of what your result is, it is not the end of the world.” She said the words like something she had said a thousand times before and will say a thousand times more. “People who are HIV positive live normal lives…” Her voice faded as I tried to distract myself from her pity talk. 

The office stank of Izal and disinfectants and the walls were lined with colorful posters about HIV. One of them read, “protect your unborn child from HIV by observing your regimen.” Beneath the words, there was a diagram of a heavily pregnant woman clutching a bottle of pills. Another poster showed a healthy-looking man who was HIV + and on his drugs and another emaciated and unkempt man who was not on medication. 

          “Mr. Peter… you are HIV positive,” she said after her lengthy speech. 

Year 2 2018. Medication. 

  It has been 365 days of gobbling down these pills that are the size of a thumb. 365 days of eating my last meal of the day at 8PM, so that I can take the pills by 10PM. There can be no mistake with the timing of either. If I eat later than 8PM, the food reacts with my drug and makes my sleep a vacation to hell.  Sometimes- actually most times, I do not eat at all, I just take the pill and go straight to the bed. 

 It’s been 365 days of waking up to banging headaches, red eyes and fuzzy vision. I am starting to get used to it now, I just stand upright and walk around for a few minutes without opening my eyes.  Make no mistake, the drugs saved me. In the months since I began taking my Anti-retroviral meds, I have gone from weighing 55KG to 79KG, I have gone from a viral load of 88,000 to less than 20, my gums no longer bleed and I no longer sweat at night. Hallelujah! But at what cost? 

  In 365 days I have not been to ICM. Not when Olamide invited me, not when Amanda threw a birthday party at Spurs. I fear they would notice my red eyes and begin making inquiries. I no longer attend late night parties either. The one time I did, someone caught me sliding to the bathroom to pop a pill in my mouth. I lied that it was typhoid medication. I became a social pariah of my own making. My room became my refuge, it is the only place I could suffer anonymously without giving away the scourge I was battling. 

Every three months I show up at the crowded HIV center at LUTH adorning a Nike face cap, tilted downwards to shield my face. But that never stops the prying eyes of other patients wondering what business a young man had in an AIDS clinic. I was one of the youngest patients there, asides children who were born with the virus. Their pity looks always annoy me. Bitches we are dealing with the same virus, save the pity for yourselves. 

          But that is all I get whenever I show up here. Pity. The nurses who take my blood pressure and blood sample also take turns darting pitiful looks at me. Those amebo people. They could not help themselves. One day one of them just could not hold it back any longer.
        “Nna okwa ibu onye Igbo?” Here we go! 

       “Yes ma!” 

       “Oohh. Do your parents know?”

        “No ma!” I blurted and waited for her to ask me how I got it so I can yell in her face that I got it from sleeping with her closeted gay husband. 

        “Ndo oo. It is not the end of the world”. If I had a penny for every time I heard that silly phrase, I would probably own a castle. 

“Thank you ma!” 

Year 3 2019. Suicide 

       I have lost count of the number of times that I have contemplated suicide. Fifteen or maybe sixteen times. The first few times, I crossed busy roads without checking for oncoming vehicles, hoping and expecting to be swept off my feet and into a realm where I did not have to worry about the stigmas associated with my affliction. Nobody ever obliged me, not the reckless Danfo drivers, not the truck drivers who were often high on Tramadol.

  One time I tried cutting my wrist. I had seen how effective and painless those were in Hollywood movies, but I usually cut too mildly, enough to produce little blood but not enough to end me. I thought about Sniper, the potent insecticide that kills in minutes. But Sniper brought with it sharp and immeasurable pain with the victims often soiling themselves just before the end. I know this from the numerous suicide videos I had seen on Twitter. Despite my anxiousness to die, I did not think I wanted to sign out kicking, screaming, and soiling myself.  

When I was not actively trying to kill myself or thinking of killing myself, I usually thought about killing Emmanuel. The healthy-looking vermin that went about disseminating the virus. It had to be him. I had tested negative for HIV just months earlier before our paths crossed at a party in Lekki and our infamous 7-minute romp happened. It was seven minutes that would change the course of my life. Seven minutes that would put me on medication for life. Even my parents, in their late sixties, were not on life medication. 

I called him weeks later to complain about the warts, fever and diarrhea. “Are you sure I did not get anything from you?” he cackled and asked me to “mind the people I sleep with.” The audacity! I should have minded him at that party, walking around kissing folks randomly like Lucifer with a reptile’s tail. 

It was unfair that I had to go through this alone. I could not even tell my family; how would I explain being HIV+ at 22 to them? I was too young for this. All I wanted was to live like any other normal 22-year-old boy. Worrying about graduating with a 2’1 and going for NYSC. Falling in love and going on dinner dates. Swallowing thumb-sized pills and standing in queues for ARVs was not what I had planned for myself or my life.  I decided to cut my wrist one more time. 

Year 4, 2020. COVID. 

One thing I have gotten used to as a HIV+ positive individual is that I am almost always classified among the “high risk group” for any disease. But when COVID-19 rolled into Lagos in February 2020, a new level of trepidation hit me. As usual, HIV+ folks were classified among “Individuals at most risk.”

While people adorned their Ankara facemasks, I opted to buy one for N95. I did not strive to keep myself alive from AIDS for four years only to be killed by Covid. I isolated myself in my room and  never stepped out of the house. I washed my hands regularly and all the yadda yadda that made up safety precautions that period. That did not work. In May 2020, I contracted Covid. My sister, a nurse, had contracted it from work and distributed it to the rest of us at home like party jollof rice.  

There are many things HIV does to you: fear, paranoia, anxiety. You name it. And in 2020 when I contracted Covid, a new wave of fear and paranoia seeped into what was left of my mental health. I cannot remember if I lost my sense of smell and taste, I was too busy boiling in the lava beneath my epidermis to notice. Every time I coughed, I felt my lung slamming against my rib cage. My parents showed mild symptoms, mine were out of the roof. It took 10 days to flush the virus out of my system, and it presented an opportunity to finally tell my parents about my HIV status. I took it. 

Year 5, 2021. Hope.

It has been 6 months now since my clinic changed my drugs. I remember this because of the beaming smiles I exuded when I was told the new one had no Lamudivine. This meant that the new drugs had absolutely no side effects. I could take them with or without food. I could take them morning or night. At last, in the 4 years that I have been HIV positive I sleep well at night. No nightmares, no yellow eyes, and no splitting headaches when I wake up.

It’s been 6 months of living life like I have no virus resident in this beautiful body of mine. Six months of living life like a normal 27-year-old. I could now visit ICM and I did quite a few times. But it was no longer the queer conglomeration site it used to be.  I am no longer a pariah. 

I am aware that someday, this virus may still mutate and destroy me. I am aware that this drug that has saved me from shriveling up, withering away like a dead leaf may fail me someday and leave me at the mercy of a rampaging virus. Until then, I intend to live everyday like a victor, a human, a lover.