My Ignorance

I know what the end stages of AIDS looks like. I know the ending quite well, it’s the beginning that I’m apparently ignorant about.

I’ve spent the last couple of days reading personal accounts on living with HIV/AIDS, I’ve read various blogs (http://www.conversationsintime.blogspot.com/ is one of my favorites) and online journals and I’ve come to the realization that I know a lot less that I thought I did. I understand the dying aspect of the disease, but not the living with or how.

At the hospice, very few residents talk about their lives before they arrived, they don’t discuss the medications that failed them and they are no longer on any type of antiretroviral meds. Their T-cells are almost in the single digits and their viral loads are always extremely high. They are at the hospice to die, there is no fighting for life, there’s only trying to ease their suffering as best we can.

There are so many aspects to this disease that I don’t know or understand, not to say that I haven’t tried to educate myself because I have. I’ve read and researched and listened and YET my ignorance still surprises me. I recently spent hours upon hours reading about people LIVING with HIV/AIDS, and I was humbled and saddened because I know that some of the residents at the hospice are dying because they never got a chance. They didn’t know how to fight or where to turn, so they just gave up and now they are going to die when they could have lived.

I will embrace my ignorance because in doing so I will never become overly confident. I will always seek knowledge, and I will never forget. Always evolving, just like the virus.