In The Beginning

Mary Ero
Mary Ero
Nov 7 · 8 min read

The conversation about HIV/ AIDS is still tainted by terror-inducing messages of deteriorating health, infection and instantaneous death. When I was diagnosed HIV positive 10 years ago, I didn’t think or know any better. It took a lot of sludging through hate, rejection, ignorance, and fear to arrive at this destination where I am as comfortable discussing my status, as I am the weather. ‘HIV is real’ no doubt but so are the people living regular, everyday lives with it. I am one of them. And I document all that here to serve as a beacon of light for people like me, a cautionary tale for others, but more importantly to break the culture of silence that we hold on to so dearly, and so foolishly, in this country.

My doctor sat behind his desk with his head in his hands. On his desk lay an open case file presumably mine with the words ‘HIV POSITIVE’ scrawled in red letters so large I could see them from the door as I walked in. I sat in the chair opposite the doctor. He seemed to be struggling to speak to me; he would begin and cut himself off.

“Err… the thing is.. You see…” All the while his hands caressed the open pages of the case note in front of him.

“It’s ok”, I said, patting his hand. “I have already seen it.”

This hospital visit was the climax of several long weeks of pure terror. Two weeks before, I had had my blood drawn and tested for HIV and other medical conditions as part of the process of registration for antenatal services in this private facility. Everything came out negative, save for the HIV test. That was inconclusive. As was the practice then, the blood sample had to be taken to the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), the only facility that had the wherewithal to manage HIV at that time, for a more conclusive result. This would take two weeks.

In those two weeks, I died a thousand times thinking of all the ways I could be informed that I had HIV. I had little doubt that the result would be positive owing to some antecedents in my life- which I will discuss later — and owing to my life’s downward trajectory at that time.

Further and Further Down the Rabbit Hole

At the time of my visit to the doctor, my life had begun disintegrating steadily. On one hand, I was certifiably homeless. The apartment building, I and eleven other tenants had been living in, had been sold off by the owner, our landlord, to estate developers. Without prior warning, these developers began demolishing the building. I remember coming home every night to an eerie sight: heaped rubble from the building that was being demolished appearing to morph into monsters in the dim light, vacuous as one more neighbour had moved out, and dark because the electricity had been cut off. It was a puzzling situation for me because, just under a fortnight, I had paid rent for one more year to the landlord, and there had been no word of this new ‘takeover’. Only for him to request a meeting with me a week or so later, return my money and apologise that he had sold the house and we would all need to move in one week.

Finding suitable accommodation in Lagos is an uphill task, finding one in a week with limited funds, is virtually impossible. I tried to raise a loan from my office to make enough for a year’s rent, but that plan was deftly side swept by my boss. Eventually, I decided for my own safety to move my property to a friend’s house for storage, and stay in a cheap hotel, until I could decide on a proper course of action. Not a grade A plan, but I was trying to avoid having my domestic issues interfere with my ability to go to work (and earn an income).

I distinctly remember enjoying being in the hotel; it was in a part of town that I liked, it was comfortable, with the usual cleaning services and constant electricity, and save for the money I had to shell out daily for my lodging, nothing was required of me.

(I realise as I write this that I have never really been someone who painstakingly plans for the future or invests present efforts into a forthcoming reward. I would worry, but at the same time, I would live in the moment. It’s a virtue and a vice at the same time. And I did that even while I was holed up in the hotel.)

One of the perks or problems of being in a hotel for an extended stay was sorting out how / what to eat. Most of the time I would subsist on fast food from a joint which was quite close to me. This day, however, I decided I had had enough of fast food and I took a taxi to a popular pub a short distance away. (If I were to retrace my steps this would be the thing I would not do ever again.) As I alighted from the taxi, a few men were alighting from an off-road vehicle beside me. One of them was my on-again-off -again boyfriend, let’s call him A.

A and I were in what I believed was a complicated relationship — in retrospect I know now that there is no such thing- where he would call me out of the blues, treat me great and disappear to God-knows-where. My self -esteem which was in the pits ensured that he got away with doing this every time, my unresolved trauma (discussed later) ensured that I thought it would all end in his realising that he loved me. As at the time of the meeting we had been in this situation for 8 years.

It turned out A was with his work colleagues and they were at the pub for their lunch break. He didn’t seem particularly pleased to see me when I called out to him, but I dismissed that. We all sat down to eat together after which he made to leave. As he was leaving, he turned to me and said ‘’Give me a big kiss’’ and opened his mouth really wide. It was simultaneously awkward, condescending and embarrassing — both the kiss and the request — but I obliged because well, I was not equipped then to rationalise things when I was around my love interest. He then left me supposedly in the care of his colleagues and went to work. His colleague’s somewhat disrespectful behaviour towards me (someone I only just met grabbing me for a full-frontal hug before I sat in my taxi) should have given an indication of how low I ranked in my ‘boyfriend’s’ ratings but I was way past noticing warning signs not to mention heeding them.

A few days later, a friend who came visiting me at the hotel, unintentionally informed me that my boyfriend got married two weeks before. It was one of those weird situations where the conversation about someone else affected one of the people involved in the conversation. Fast forward to later that evening or the next, owing to an angry text I sent chiding him for kissing a girl in public when he was married, A was in my hotel room explaining to me how he was not married. He stayed all that day with me and most of the next, primarily because I was experiencing severe pains from what I now know was a large fibroid. As these things happen, one thing led to another and we had sex which led to conception, despite the heaped odds of my intermittent illness and our use of contraception.

I told A about the pregnancy when I was about a month and a half gone. I had taken a test to be certain. I am still amazed to this day at the change in his character when I broke the news. He became cold, defensive and antagonistic, accusing me of trying to bring him down or manipulating things. He threatened, coerced and persuaded me to carry out an abortion and when I mentioned my prevailing medical condition, he promised the best medical facility. But save for one meeting at that pub again, A would only communicate with me over the phone. Our calls became reduced to lengthy, heated exchanges full of threats and demands for an abortion. When he was certain I would not give in, A finally cut off all communication and contact with me. I was about 3 months pregnant.

Becoming A Statistic by Numbers

A lot of what happened after the revelation by my doctor comes back to me in numbers. After one month in the hotel, my then best friend asked that I come to stay with her in her newly- rented home. When I was seven-and-a-half months pregnant she kicked me out over a relatively minor issue. My job was terminated when I was six months pregnant, so I had practically no options. I stayed in two other places, after being kicked out of the penultimate place two weeks before my delivery. I left the last place when my baby was a week old.

But by far the scariest numbers were those that had to do with my health. The doctor had convinced me that going to the HIV treatment centre in LUTH would be a frustrating, shameful experience. I believed him. His solution was that he would provide me the Anti Retro Viral drugs (ARVs) needed to manage HIV, for a fee. I paid him the equivalent of $100 every month for these. In my 8th month of pregnancy, my finances had depleted, and I was forced to register at a public hospital to give birth. There I learnt that this doctor had been giving me the wrong drugs in the wrong dosage the entire time…. The doctor was not just dramatic and unprofessional, he was also incompetent.

When I left my third and final accommodation I went to my parents’ in another state in the country. Unknown to me I would be there jobless and mostly penniless for 2 years. The shame that had been projected on me by the doctor and my ignorance of HIV however, lingered even after I had left Lagos. I never sought treatment in those two years. The third year, however, after I exited a particularly sordid job in Lagos, I decided to take better care of myself by seeking treatment and care for my HIV infection. Irrespective of my resolve it would be a little over two years before I would receive quality care and treatment, and feel somewhat whole again.

So, what life arc led me to the point where I had become a jilted babymama, infected with HIV, and with almost no options? That is another story, and it begins almost 30 years ago with the sexual abuse of a 13-year-old girl by a Catholic priest.

To Be Continued

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