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Matt Merry does not remember the exact words his mother told him HIV .
Just remember that he did not know how to react. At least not first, in front of his mother.
He had sat at the table in the living room of his house in Rugby, England, to announce the news. Matt was 12 years old
He had been living with the virus for four years, his mother explained
He had been infected with an injection that he had been given to treat his hemophilia, a blood disorder that had been diagnosed We were in 1986 and we were in the midst of an AIDS epidemic, and a diagnosis of HIV was received as a death sentence
. He was probably going to live another two years, the doctors were telling his parents.
That night, lying in bed with the lights off, the numbness he had felt all day began to fade and Matt began to
All that was wrong. 39 He knew of HIV and AIDS were images of skeletal youth, with bodies covered with wounds, losing their lives in l Hospital Corridors. And he started crying. "Since then and throughout my teenage years, I have felt that I had a clock in countdown mode and that at any time someone could press this countdown. for two years until his death. "Remember,
But his mother said something else: he should not tell anyone. No friends, no teachers … at first, not even his little brother.
An indescribable secret
When he returned to school, he took with him a secret that he could not share.
In 1986, people with HIV or AIDS were subject to perverse and visceral fear.
In the media, the disease was associated with drug addicts and homosexual men, who were continually stigmatized.
In the analysand today, Matt believes that his parents did well by deciding to keep the secret.
"In reality, it was not a real option to let people know," he says. Sometimes other classmates got involved with him because of his hemophilia. So you can not imagine what it would be like if you knew about their HIV diagnosis.
Thousands of people had already been infected by HIV by transfusions of tainted blood. Matt had heard that in some schools, parents had released the children when they had learned that there was a person with hemophilia in their class.
But the weight of their secret was very big.
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He was never offered any therapy or psychological support.
"I guess I could have talked to someone else. My mother or father, or my brother, but it was so disturbing that I did not want to talk about it because I knew that I was going to cry, so I locked myself in and I went on to moving forward. "
For his friends and classmates everything seemed normal.Nobody knew what was going on in his head.But he was certain that he would be dead by the time he was 20 years old.It was n & # 39; Never could have a girlfriend, or get married, or have children.
He finally learned that he had also been infected with hepatitis C.
With this scenario, Matt has stopped fighting at school Total, what for?
"Why spend all this time revising and doing homework if I do not want to have a career or anything?" , He thought.
Without realizing it, Matt had been involved in that is considered the biggest scandal in the history of the United Kingdom's public health system (NHS)
According to militant organizations, at least 2,800 people with hemophilia have died from the use of medical articles with tainted blood, and d. other tens of thousands of non-hemophiliacs have been infected with different viruses.
Treatments with "factor VIII"
During the 70s and 80s it became popular a new treatment for hemophilia based on protein injections called concentrates of factor, usually factor VIII, which helped blood clotting.
These products were made from donated blood plasma, and there was so much UK The fact that the NHS started to import it from abroad, especially from the United States .
But Matt and his family did not know that much of the American imported Factor VIII was made from plasma donated by incarcerated or dependent people. to drugs, considered as high-risk groups to contract diseases such as HIV or hepatitis C.
In many cases, they had been paid to make these donations. And since these products were manufactured in large quantities from the plasma of tens of thousands of people, with which only one donation was contaminated, the whole lot was.
As the AIDS crisis progressed in the 1980s, the UK Department of Health received written alerts that products from the United States needed to be recalled. But the measure was only put in place in 1986, years after the arrival of the first notices.
When Matt's mother learned that his son had been infected by HIV he did not even know that As there was no tomorrow
Nobody in Matt's school circle did not know why he had made such bad grades.
The years before college were exhausted. ""
Despite the prognosis of two years of life, and not to mention his hemophilia, Matt was in good health.
In 1990, just after the age of 16, a "try not to think in the future and, when you do, you feel bad and try to distract yourself, "he wrote in the report.
They also described that Matt had" a mechanism of psychological defense. "but that" could easily be transferred and, when that happened "
According to the psychiatrist, in the years that followed, it was likely that" Matt would suffer great emotional hardship, "whether it be or not suffering from AIDS.
"He will find it difficult to establish satisfactory relationships with the opposite sex given the real danger of transmission of infection," he added.
"He's worried already for that and is anxious about the fact that he will not be able to have children. "
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It was at this time that Matt started smoking cannabis.He later consumed other synthetic drugs such as speed and ecstasy. 19659002] It was the early '90s and Matt turned full on the rave scene of parties and drugs until dawn.
He told them, "And why not , I do not have much time left, I want to try to enjoy as much experience as possible before I die. "
It was not easy to dismantle this argument. or 18 years old and after a night of drinking in town, he went home with a friend and something encouraged him to tell him that he had for the first time HIV somebody. one outside his immediate family circle
His friend was shocked, but he was very understanding
Matt was very relieved, for the next three or four years he was started talking to his closest friends individually. With time, talking about it has become easier and it has never found a negative reaction from any of them.
When he was 20, Matt saw how many of his friends were going to study at the University of Birmingham, so he went to live there too just to keep on partying.
Then he had the feeling that he was starting to fall behind. His friends were moving forward with their lives, graduating, forming couples … but he was not doing it.
There was no specific moment when he had a revelation, but little by little he began to think, "I have this since I was 8 years old. and they always told me that I had two years to live. "
" And if it is not two years old, and if it is longer? "
It never came to her mind that she could reach 50 or 60 years old Then he realized that he had to do something in case he would end up to live another ten years.
To get out of the hole
So he enrolled in a course at the University of Birmingham and, for the first time since his diagnosis of HIV he worked hard at his studies and got good grades.
"For me, it was a turning point," he says. "I thought," I can really do that. ""
And a first degree took him to a bachelor's degree.
Meanwhile, medical examinations continued. Normally HIV killed CD4 cells, but their blood levels showed adequate levels.
What started to give him problems, was his hepatitis.
A biopsy revealed that his liver had scars and he was damaged so he started a hard treatment with very potent drugs, ribavirin and interferon, to try and get rid of the virus.
After 12 months, the doctors had good news: he was free of hepatitis C.
when Matt took a momentum and went to Australia, the place the further away from his life at Rugby and the people who knew him forever.
"I think I went on a trip to get away from myself.]" I wanted new people who did not know me, I could be someone else, I could forget , essentially, all that had happened in recent years and the emotional charge I was carrying. "
easier to meet there, only meeting them for a short period of time
. For the first time, he began to consider the idea of having a relationship and his parents had always thought of talking to potential partners about their health and giving them the opportunity to break the relationship.
But Was much more frightening than telling close friends
some girls, but the relationships did not happen small summer affairs.
2000: Back Home
] Matt returned to England shortly before Christmas 2000. And at that moment he started to think maybe I would end up living long
"I think travel has helped a lot," he admits. Among other things, to get rid of prejudices about HIV
And with the advent of antiretroviral therapy, people stopped to consider HIV as an automatic death sentence.
In 2003, during a trip to a bachelor party, Matt met a girl with whom he exchanged phone numbers.
They quickly started dating. Already at the beginning of the relationship, Matt mentioned that he had HIV and that he was ready to be rejected. But that "did not baffled her."
In 2008, they married. "He did not care at all about it."
A New Life
If finding a partner was for him out of the imagination, having children would have seemed totally unthinkable.
"he says.
But one of his childhood friends, who was also hemophiliac, told him that he had been a father through a technique called sperm washing, a form of assisted reproduction.
Matt He was interested in this technique but was surprised when an expert told him that since his viral load was virtually undetectable, it would be safe for them to have a baby naturally.
"I could not believe what they were telling me," he said. "I thought," Do you know what I've lived for 15 or 20 years? ""
"But fearing the slightest possibility of transmitting the virus to my son, after my own experience, I did not want to take any risk" "
" So we did three cycles with this sperm washing technique and we had a child, then we went back to repeat it for the second.
Being a father changed Matt's life.
Seeing that his children are approaching the age at which he was told that he was sick, he thinks about the magnitude of what has happened to him.
"It's the only time I'm excited," he says. "It irritates me, it's like a misplaced anger, as if it were done to my children, not to me."
A lottery
How would you react if you were said today that your children have two? years of life? "God, I do not know what I would do, only God knows how my parents felt."
After decades of lobbying by activists, the British government is about to open a public inquiry into the scandal of the
It never stops being surprised when it looks on its own history. Of the 1250 patients estimated to have been infected with hepatitis C and HIV for this scandal, fewer than 250 are still alive, according to the Tainted Blood organization.
"In terms of death, it's really like If the lottery had touched me," he says,
Matt believes that, despite the large number of victims, the scandal does not … did not attract much attention because of the legacy of stigma HIV and AIDS . And for that, he wants to tell his story.
"I am happy in my life now: I have a big family, with a wife and two wonderful children."
"I have every reason to be grateful, but I should not have to feel grateful for that."
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