The Archives - World AIDS Day 2000

Yep, more World AIDS Day blog entries from a little while back: December 2, 2000 World AIDS Day was yesterday. I completely forgot about it. Weird. But new news on the HIV front. I have been to the doctor recently...for the first time in nearly a year. Usually I have some slight anxiety about these visits to the doc, just because there's always this fear of getting bad news. This time the anxiety was much stronger for two reasons. Of course the first reason was because I hadn't been in a year. All that time for something to go wrong without my knowing of it. But the second reason - and this is the BIG one - was because I stopped taking HIV meds in April. Yep, I did. That's quite a risky thing, I know. But from what I've read (and I did a lot of research before I did this), many people and go on these medication breaks without developing resistance to the medications, as long as they stop all meds completely. Now I don't really recommend this, but for me it seemed like the right choice at the time. Really added to the worry though when I finally made it back to see a doctor. Of course, being off meds, I couldn't expect my viral load or t-cell count to stay where they were. I'd actually planned for the worst news. Turned out I didn't have a great deal to worry about. Over six months off meds and my t-cells hardly fell at all. They're still in the 'normal' percentage range and that number only dropped by 2 percent. Viral load was up as expected, but it was nowhere near as high as I thought it may be. It came in at around 15K. Still very manageable in my mind. The doc said she wanted to monitor things a little more closely now...maybe every two months...but there was no need for me to go back on meds. Yah! Sometimes I feel very lucky. j-