I am sitting in the doctor's office, trying to read the thumbed-through pages of Good Housekeeping. Or watch the reruns of ER on TV. Or pay attention to the cute little five-year-old girl with beads braided into her hair who keeps playing peek-a-boo with me.
Anything to keep my mind off why I am here.
I am here for an HIV test.
It shouldn't be this nerve-wracking to get one. I've taken the test numerous times in my life. But I have not had one for more than seven years.
As I sit in the waiting room nervously swinging my crossed legs, I remember the first HIV test I ever had. I was home from college for winter break, and I had just come out to my family. It was 1986, the height of AIDS panic. The first question that came out of their mouths when I told them I was gay was whether I also had AIDS.
The truth was, I didn't know. I'd never had a test before, and the concerns about privacy combined with the lack of any real medical care were strong arguments against having the test. I had decided the risk of taking the test was too high. Indeed, I'd made some kind of peace with the notion that I probably would turn up HIV-positive, since in my years of denial about being gay I hadn't practiced safer sex. As long as I was healthy, I could go on suspecting without having to have an answer. But my tense, loving, frightened parents could make no such bargain with the potential death of their son. There was a test now, and I was going to take it.
So one cold January morning, I drove alone the 15 miles or so from the small town of Hershey, Penn., where my family lived, to the nearest HIV testing facility located in Harrisburg, the state capital and the closest thing we had to a big city. The nurse at the government testing center there seemed almost as nervous and worried for me as my mother was. She blushed when she gave me the speech about safer sex. When she made the appointment for me to return in two weeks to pick up the test results, she reminded me that many people came and took the test but never actually returned to pick up their results. I nodded silently to signal my understanding. When I left the nurse's office that day, she hugged me goodbye.
Two weeks later, on the day I was to pick up my results, there was a snowstorm. The TV weatherman advised against unnecessary traffic. But by now, the drama of getting the test and the anticipation of the ensuing wait, had gotten to me, especially with the question of life or death looming as starkly as it seemed to in those days. I wanted to know.
So I hopped into my Volkswagen Beetle and negotiated the icy roads back to Harrisburg.
When I went into the nurse's office, she was beaming. 'It's negative!' she yelped before even saying hello. She lunged at me and gave me another big, maternal hug.
Out in the parking lot, I started to tremble. I had made my peace with an illness and a death too soon, it turned out, and the shock of the good news was coursing through my body. A few minutes later, I got in my vehicle and skidded on the street headfirst into an oncoming car. A large African American woman in a fur coat and dress hat emerged from her automobile with an angry look on her face. When I got out of my car, I know I was smiling. I could see the perplexity in her face. But all I could think was, 'It's OK, ma'am! I am going to live!'
After that first test, I got tested every year for a decade. They all came back negative, as I expected them to, and after a while I simply stopped going for tests. I like to tell myself that I haven't gotten a test for so long because I am no longer worried, that I don't do anything that puts me at risk. For a while, I convinced myself that getting tested is no longer a big deal, that my avoidance had more to do with a busy schedule than any of the tangible fears of those early years.
But as I am finding out in the waiting room, it hasn't gotten any easier, any less nerve-wracking to go for a test. It never does.
Even if you practice safer sex, there is always the fear, always the doubt. Always the questions about whether or not there was some small, undetected cut in your mouth or whether or not precum is as safe or as dangerous as you last read. You always wonder if you took too much of a chance here or there, if there is something you don't know that could in fact kill you.
And of course, there's always the bargaining. Dear God, let the test be negative, and I will never swallow cum or rim again. And then there is the peacemaking. OK, you tell yourself, if the test comes back positive, it certainly isn't the black or white, life or death decree we once saw it as. You know plenty of people who are HIV-positive who are healthy and happy and go on with their lives in every way. Medical care today is better than ever before. And so on, and so on.
It's all true, of course. But none of it changes the fact that you desperately want that test to come back negative, because if it doesn't, you know everything changes.
I am making one final play at peek-a-boo with the braided-head little girl, when a nurse comes to the office door and calls out my name.
It's time to get tested.
MubarakDah@aol.com
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