Almost there

Well.. we are almost to the end of the semester and although my blog is late - better late than never. Things have been crazy with my children and husband staying sick over the past couple of weeks. But I finally managed to set some time aside to talk about my HIV education experience this week. This week I actually spoke with a friend who had a friend who died from AIDS and she has another friend who is currently HIV positive. It kind of brought the subject to life for me in a different way. This virus creates a disease that leaves lasting impressions on people... real things happen to these people and the people they love ad surround them. She was telling me about her deceased friend and how the family members of these people reacted to the disease and to the person. They embraced the person and didn't even look at the disease as a part of the person who was affected by it. This kind of brought it a different level to me. I knew it was out there and existed, but it was never real to me.

Children and HIV

This week I was still thinking about QOTW #9 and wondering how many children get infected in the United States and how. I was actually surprised that the numbers were not higher. In 2000, the number of new infections in children under 13 was just over 100 (HIVinfosource.org, 2009). In June 2001, the number of new infections in children between the ages of 13-19 was approximately 4,219 (HIVinfosource.org, 2009). In children under 13, the transmission usually occurs through birth or breastfeeding. Very few infections in the United States are due to blood transfusions, because the blood in the US is screened. Other countries cannot afford to screen their blood, so transfusion infections are still prominent in those countries. In children between 13-19, most of the infections are due to sexual intercourse and some to IV drug use. (HIVinfosource.org, 2009).
The QOTW this week was about different measures that other countries are trying to take against people with HIV. It made me think about HIV education. I think that the spread of HIV could be decreased if the people were more educated. I think people are scared of what they don't know.
I will be attending the Men's panel next Wednesday and am excited about it. I look forward to hearing about their experiences and things they go through.

http://www.hivinfosource.org/hivis/hivbasics/children/index.html

What a week!

Wow! It seems like as the weeks go on in this semester, the busier and busier I seem to get. This week we are doing our final simulation. We have to pretend that we have HIV and follow a medication regime throughout the whole week. We are in Day 4 right now and I do not know how someone with HIV actually follows their daily medication intake. I work 3rd shift at the hospital and try to sleep during the day between caring for three children. I've missed several doses of my meds and feel a bit overwhelmed. My schedule does not work with this schedule, but I have to make it all work!
My topic of interest is how mothers deal with children who are HIV positive. It happens that our QOTW last week (the one about your child biting someone) was actually a true incident. It happened to our professor's child. This brings it more home to me that someone "close" to me has experienced something like this. I respect Teach for handling it the way she did. I answered the QOTW with an opposite reaction, but one really never knows what they will do when placed in a tough situation where their child can be potentially at trisk for humiliation and ridicule.

Raising HIV positive children

Did you know?
Do you know how you would raise an HIV positive child? I read an article online, it was an interview with a mother of an HIV positve child. The mother, Maria, believes that she transmitted HIV to her daughter in infancy when she breastfed her. She was living with an abusive man and finally decided to leave. She got into contact the Community Planning Council and got tested for HIV. She was breastfeeding her daughther then and got her tested. She came back positive, as well. She then got in contact with an organization called GMHC - Gay Men's Health Crisis. They've helped her get on her feet and make a nice life for her and her children. Maria told her daughter about their status when she was only five years old. At first, she was scared, but then she became comfortable with it. Together, they rally for HIV and AIDS. Maria says that her daughter wants to be a lawyer for kids with AIDS. She's been through tough discrimination and has come out stronger.
http://www.gmhc.org/health/women/positive_children.html

This article and this week's QOTW has gotten me to think about raising HIV positive children. I imagine that it would be very hard to do - emotionally, physicall, aand mentally. This weeks QOTW was about finding out that your HIV positve child had just bitten another child and the principal wanted to reveal the status to the other child's parents. After days of thinking about it, I decided that I think in the end the truth should be told, but I would want to be the one to tell the parents. In this day in age, I would like to think that respect and privacy still exist. I would like to think that the parents of the other child would respect my honesty and not reveal this info with anyone else. In the artive that I read, the mother and daughter are very open about their HIV positive status. I completely respect them for that, but I think I would be afraid to be so open about something like that for fear of being stigmatized. Her daughter has suffered lots of discrimination and that did make her a stronger person, but I would be afraid of having my children stereotyped. I know that I would not treat my children any different, but the sad reality is, that not everyone has the same heart. Children can be cruel and that can damage another child's self esteem and self worth.

Did you know about HIV and Kissing?

During this week, I watched Modules 5, 6, and 7 on Transmission and Prevention. One of the slides was about kissing. I've always wondered if one could get HIV from kissing. Up until now, the question was still uncertain. Accoridng to the CDC, casual kisses are safe. There is no exchange of fluids (CDC, 2009). Open mouth kissing, or "french kissing", has more of a risk. There is very little risk of contracting HIV through open mouth kissing, but there is a possibility that there could be an open sore in one of the mouths and HIV can be spread that way (CDC, 2009).
This week has been another crazy week - this seems to be the norm these days. As I mentioned before, I went through the slides for Modules 5, 6, and 7 and of course, my mind started going. In Module 5 - Myths, it goes through all the different ways people might think they could contract HIV if they didn't "know any better". Some of these ways are sitting on the same toilet as an infected person, breathing the same air, living in the same house or aprtment, mosquito transmission, or being in a bathtub, pool, or hottub (Douglass, Slides 1-15). Before taking this class I wondered about the hottub and pool and mosquito transmission. I now know that these are simply misconceptions. It is very easy to have misconceptions about HIV if you don't know about it.

Douglass, Sharon. Power Point Module 5 Myths, October 2009.

http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/qa/qa17.htm

Did you know?

This week has been an extremely crazy weeks for me. It seems like I had papers, projects, and exams in all 5 of my classes. But, of course, there's been plenty of growth on my knowledge and feelings about HIV. This week has been extremely stressful for me. I had my HIV test done last week and for some reason this week I've spent alot of time reflecting on that. It's kind of hard to explain. I am married and have three children and have had an HIV test for each child, BUT I never had to go back to pick up my results or anything like that. Actually now that I think of it, I don't think my results were ever offered to me. So, I am excited and scared at the same time to see what the process is. When I went to get tested, I felt like I had to let everyone know that I was there for a class assignment. I made it a point to let the counselor know more than anyone else. When I left the facility, I felt kind of ashamed of myself for having done that. What did it matter why I was there? What did it matter why the person sitting next to me was there? Ultimately we were there for the same reason - regardless of WHY.
Another thing happened to me this week that was pretty exciting (well for me anyway knowing that I am really learning something) was at work. I work in a hospital and the other night we had a female patient come in for a high fever. She was lying on her side and I noticed some marks on her back. As I stepped closer, I could see that they were KS lesions. This patient was actually in the AIDS stage. I could easily tell by her physical appearance. She was very thin and frail. She also had that "parentheses" look in her faced that was discussed in the Module of Signs and Symptoms. It was very sad to actually be there with someone who was dying from AIDS. I felt something different inside at that moment. It was a feeling of compassion and sympathy not scared or frightened.
Moving on to the Did you know portion of our blog. We were to research the HIV confidentiality laws of certain countries. I chose to do South Africa. Back in 1994, the concept of "shared confidentiality" came about, meaning certain information could be shared within members of a certain community (Seidell, 419). This policy allowed the sharing of this information to other HIV/AIDS based professionals. People were encouraged to share their status with people who could've possibly been infected. (Seidell, 419) A new policy had to be put into place because the people wanted more of an "individual" confidentiality law. So, one was put into place. (Seidell, 420).


Correspondence: Dr Gill Seidel, 10 Albert Terrace, Saltaire,
Bradford, BD18 4PS, UK.

HEALTH POLICY AND PLANNING; 11(4): 418-427

HIV becomes more real

I have spent this week watching movies for my HIV class and taking in all the information from the movies I have watched. So far I've watched Age of Aids, Common Threads, and Silverlake Life. Common Threads is a documentary about a quilt that was put together by the families of AIDS victims. In this movie, there are several different families that get the opportunity to tell their story of theri lost loved one. There are stories about a hemophiliac young boy, a couple who got married and the husband was a drug abuser, a homosexual couple (consisting of a gay male and lesbian female who decide to have a baby together), and two homosexual couples. This movie worked inside of me in a special way. As I watched these people tell their stories of love, strength, AIDS, and the lost of loved ones, I started to feel how some of these people must have felt. I immediately tried to put myself in their shoes and I began to feel pain. I felt pain for the victim and for the victim's families. The story of the young hemophiliac boy broke my heart and I found tears rolling down my face from that point on.
Silverlake Life is another heart wrenching movie that captures the life of a gay couple that find out they are HIV positive. From that moment on, they begin to make a documentary following their life and the progression of the disease. To be honest, this movie didn't capture my attention the way Common Threads did at first, but as the movie went on, I started to feel as if I was getting to know the couple and my heart started to soften and fall. By the time the movie was over, again I found myself crying.
The more assignments that I complete in this class, the more I feel I am beginning to really understand HIV and what it does not only to the people that it infects, but to all the people who are involved in their lives. I think I have said this before in one of my blogs, but HIV truly does destroy the body. It is so sad to see people go through this (not personally for me, but to see the people in those movies suffering). In Common Threads, one of the people mke the comment that one day this will go away and all that will be left is the memory of AIDS and how it destroyed America. I am frightened that it might not happen that way. AIDS is too dangerous and virulent a virus to just go away. Its not like an influneza virus that becomes virulent and destroys everything in its path until it can no longer find a succeptibl host (like the Influenza of 1918 that just went away when there was no one left to destroy). This virus kills, infects, and destroys all alike. It does not matter age, race, or religion. I don't believe the HIV virus is going anywhere anytime soon.