HIV AIDS.

It's world AIDS day today.
My plan was to get idiotically drunk since I didn't go to work because of snow, but I remembered the time I was nursing my mum on her death bed some decade and two years ago due to AIDS, and all the alcohol cravings disappeared within an instant.

There is no doubt in everyone's mind that HIV AIDS has caused a million of tears around the world. There isn't a single human being that hasn't been affected. Directly, or indirectly.

The Killer disease is thought to have attacked it's first victim in 1981. I was only a useless foetus then. No one really knows where the deadly virus popped out from. Some say a scientist got it on with a monkey during an experiment and got infected. And some say the whole gay act is what started all the trouble...
There is no proof really where AIDS came from, but the fact is: It is real. And it kills!

I remember the time I was in hospital with my mum back in Malawi, that's when it hit me that AIDS was no ill fantasy. I saw things too terrifying for my fifteen years of age. The number of patients sick with AIDS was unbelievable. The hospitals couldn't cater for them all. In the ward my mum was, there were more than six critically sick patients squashed in. And it was only fit for one. On top of the patients, there would be healthy guardians, like myself. Yes, in the same "tight" space. One guardian for each patient. Some patients would sleep under the beds. And It was freezing, and hampered with anopheles mosquitoes which would suck greedily on their already insufficient red blood cells. But there was just no room. As a guardian, it was our duty to find the most comfortable sleeping spot before the other guardians beat you to it. Mostly I would just sit through the night and listen to the patients' troubled breathing. Some of them would cough their lungs out through out the night. I remembered a certain girl who I had made friends with. She had just gotten married and was pregnant, and sick with TB.
Unlike the rest of the patients, she wasn't skin and bones. She was the healthiest. Everyone thought it was just a matter of time before she would be discharged. Then one day she just coughed out a gut of blood. And that was the end. Her husband was in a state...
I tell you, the scene was too ugly to watch. I'm totally traumatized to this moment.
Apart from the distasteful sleeping conditions in the wards, bathrooms and toilets were another nauseating issue. Gosh! And the chambers patients who couldn't take themselves to the loo would use..., let me not even go there!

Ok, this was a hospital for the poor, but even the rich AIDS patients in rich hospitals with better conditions suffer the same fate; a long painful death!
As long as you are infected with the killer virus, you are toast. And besides being in so much pain, people isolate you in the most cruel way.
It's different when you have cancer, or any other deadly disease...

AIDS has done a lot of damages. There are some people who never even have a voice or choice in the matter. Like the defenseless children who are born infected. Like Nkosi Johnson. Or the husbands, wives, boyfriends and girlfriends with unfaithful partners.
It's heart-wrenching!

I know some people have relaxed with the invention of the ARVs. But that's a big mistake.
A life of pills on daily basis isn't worth living.
AIDS is real! And it has no mercy!
Do not take chances. Five minutes of pleasure isn't worth dying for.
"Wrap up the salami and save lives!"

*talk about AIDS and save lives. It took me a decade to talk about my mum*
*and it still hurts so bad!*

.