Being Alive, Los Angeles; Feburary 1998
Chris Griffin

And so it proved to be. Getting a positive "diagnosis" only confirmed what I had long suspected. Take a number, get in line, your bus will be along to pick you up in due time.

Through the eighties I enjoyed solid normal good health. I worked, pursued my career, went about my business. For whatever reason my immune system did not collapse quickly and relentlessly, like one of those skyscrapers imploded by dynamite we see on TV, but rather, it weakened slowly, almost imperceptibly, measured only by an unhurried diminution of T-cells.

It was almost possible for me to live in denial, to forget altogether that the plague had actually entered my body. Almost.

And then would come the end of a year. Entertainment Weekly would list the hundreds of entertainment business people who had died that year. The evening news or the newspaper would report year-end statistics, listing how many cases of AIDS there had been reported in the country so far, and how many had so far died. Invariably the ratio of total deaths to total cases of AIDS was always 50%in other words, for every two reported cases of AIDS, one person had died. And every year these totals total cases, total deaths would increase, an inexorable march toward cultural disaster and, yes, personal catastrophe.

I might still be alive, but only time would tell how long. The statistics did not lie: give it enough time, and I too would be swallowed up in the maw of this great plague.

And so the end of a year and the beginning of the next was always poignantly bittersweet. I could listen cheerfully to a church bell ring in the New Year, but at the same time, I didn't have to ask for whom that bell tolled: I knew it most likely tolled for me.

I remember the exact moment New Year's Eve, as 1989 gave way to 1990 when it struck me for the first time that it was unlikely that I would be around for the new millennium. With continually slipping T-cell counts, I could read the writing on the wall. Some people with collapsing immune systems managed to go on living for years, but the vast majority, once their T-cells fell below 50, began experiencing all the ravages of AIDS, unrelentingly to death.

That night in 1989, I found it desperately sadI knew this in my bonesthat I would never see 1999 transition into the year 2000.

Whatever it is we feel when the old year gives way to the nextnew beginnings, fresh possibilities, a renewed promise reminiscent of youth, a sense of wonder, the unloading of past baggage and a slate wiped cleanwould only be magnified exponentially when the old millennium breathed out its last and yielded to the dawning of some as yet undefined new age. How could one not want to be there for this momentous event? Wild celebration, pandemonium, religious conversions, apocalyptic ravings, sybaritic partying, harmonic convergences of the highest order, profound personal revelations and deep continental shifts.

To have lived through the last fifty years of the twentieth century and still miss the change of the millennium dispirited me immeasurably.

As the years passed, I grew more and more certain that such would be my lot, to die some time in the 90s. As I nearly did, when, on the eve of the new year of 1996, I had but eight T-cells, CMV in my right eye, candida in my throat, a permanent catheter in my left arm dripping bags of antibiotics and liquid nourishment, and a hospital bed beneath my degenerating body. The bell was tolling louder than ever before.

But now look. I watch grateful and astonished as 1997 gives birth to 1998. Thanks to protease inhibitors, I am still here, regenerated, going strong. My immune system is, at least ostensibly, healthier than it's been since 1991.

I woke in the middle of the night a few weeks back, in the hours before dawn of January 1, 1998. I just lay in bed for a few minutes feeling the warm wash of amazement, that now I have only two years to go, to reach the cusp of that new millennium.

Who would have thought?

By the grace of the gods, we will all still be here, two years from now, to usher in that new age.

The Big Uneasy: Living In the Protease Age is a recurring feature of the Newsletter. We encourage our readers to share their tales of life in the protease age: send material to Chris Griffin, c/o Being Alive, or e-mail him at grffn@aol.com

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