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.

My Week of Thinking

I had some pretty interesting and confusing thoughts this week. Thoughts about HIV and my life. What if I were to contract HIV right now? Right now that I am married and have three children? Or what if I were to find out that one of my children had HIV? Would I be able to deal with it? Or rather how would I deal with it?
I know that I am definitely growing in knowledge because of this class. I am a pretty fair person, but I will admit that when I didn't know much about the disease - it was easy for me to judge a person if I knew they were HIV positive. It was easy for me to Not want to be around them, to even fear being around them to an extent. My way of thinking has completely changed now. I feel now that if I were faced with HIV, I would handle it much differently than before. HIV is something that frightens me. It doesn't frighten me to where I think that I can easily contract it from someone else. What frightens me is what it does to one's body. I've been "surfing" the web and "googling" images of what the different infections of HIV look like. The pictures are horrifying. For our Module 4, we have to write about four diseases. One of the diseases I chose was Herpes (HSV2). In a few of the pictures herpes was compared between HIV positive people and HIV negative people. The sores of the HIV positive people were scary. They looked like craters on their skin. HIV infected people can lose their eyesight and hearing. That alone is terrifying. HIV destroys the body, completely.
That brought me back to thinking about how I would deal with one of my children having HIV. I know I would have to come to terms with it. But I wonder if it would be easier to deal with if one was not so educated about the disease and what it has the potential to do? While this class definitely helps with helping grow in knowledge, but at the same time, it has opened my eyes to the truths about HIV and some of them are hard to swalow.
I must admit that I am gaining a GREATER respect for people who have to deal with HIV, both the people who are infected by it and the people who are part of their lives.

Continuing to learn about HIV

Well, here are again, another week has gone by and I continue to learn more and more about HIV. Although my main topic of interest in learning about is mothers and how they deal with HIV, this week I have enjoyed learning about all the different diseases that present themselves due to the lack of defense provided by the immune system. There are so many opportunistic bacteria that jump in at the first sign of a weakened immune system and take over and destroy the body of the infected person. This is one aspect about HIV/AIDS that I was not aware of. I mean, I knew that a person would get really sick from HIV but I did not know HOW severe it could get and how many DIFFERENT diseases they were succeptible to. In our Module 4 for our class, there are descriptions and pictures of most of these opportunistic diseases. I was in shock as I scrolled down the Power Point. One of the diseases that made an impression on me was Herpes. The slide showed a picture of what a Herpes simples wart looks on an HIV postive person compared to what one of these blisters look like on a non HIV infected person. What a difference! The one on the positive person looked like the size of a baseball. Another one that left me speechless was the picture of candiasis (thrush). There was one picture of a person who had thrush of the mouth so severe that it looked like a felt covering over the tongue. It looked so uncomfortable. I cannot imagine how someone be able to eat having thrush so severely. We did a Thrush simulation for class where we had to put two pieces of cotton on each side of our mouth and then try to eat some saltine crackers and wash them down with water. This task was nearly impossible. Again, I cannot imagine having to deal with this long term.
These are only two examples of opportunistic diseases. I look forward to our next assignment where we get to choose four of these diseases and write about them in detail.
This part of the class has made me gain a greater respect for what HIV positive people have to suffer because of this virus.

Did you know?

Here we are in our second week of blogging. I have learned so much more in just this past week about HIV, especially statistics. After completing Module 1, I was left in awe at the amount of people who are HIV positive across the world. The statistics for Africa are just frightening. As mentioned in my previous blog, I am interested in finding out more on mothers and children with HIV. I was browsing through the web looking for some HIV organizations that provide help and support. I came across World Vision http://www.worldvision.org/content.nsf/pages/hope-child-sponsorship?Open&campaign=1193518&cmp=KNC-1193518. They are an organization that offer sponsorship services for orphaned children with HIV. They also offer help and support for widowed people as well as children that have somehow suffered because of HIV. The way it works is that you make a monthly donation and that goes to help people in need.
I would love to know of some other organizations that offer similar help. I would actually like to join one of these.
We had to read a book about HIV for our third assignment in this class. The book I chose to read is called "Sarah's Song", this book has put the disease into a different perspective for me. I could not take my eyes off of this book once I began reading it. It goes through the daily lives of a married couple who gets diagnosed with HIV in the early 80's. It takes you through their battle with HIV. It was an amazing book. It honestly changed the way I feel about certain aspects of HIV.

HIV Intro

Hi. My name is Cathia Nieves and I am a full time 3rd year student at UCF this semester. I am a Nursing major and am awaiting acceptance into the RN program. I am a proud mother of three wonderful children ages 7, 6, and 2. I've been married for seven years and feel blessed to be able to pursue my goals and dreams after being out of school for such a long time. I am first time blogger, so please excuse me as I get used to the whole blogging thing.
I wanted to take the HIV class because I am genuinely interested in the virus and how it works. I took Microbiology a couple semesters ago and it forever changed my outlook on diseases and what causes them. I was especially interested in the HIV virus, but the class did not go into much detail about it (as we had numerous bacteria and viruses to study).
I have never known anyone infected with HIV, so I do not have any personal experience with the virus. Our first assignment in this class was to do a simulation to see what it would be like to be a patient with HIV/AIDS. This simulation - which only showed one possible side effect of HIV - opened my eyes to what people with HIV must suffer on a daily basis. We take things for granted such as eating a cracker and washing it down with water. People with HIV/AIDS who develop Thrush have a hard time performing such a simple task.
What interests me most about HIV is how mothers deal with HIV (having children with it and having children without it). As we get deeper into the course, I hope to eduacte myself as to how they deal with it and all the complications that come with it. I would love to meet someone who falls into this category and build a relationship with this person. I hope to have that opportunity.