Бесплатный фрагмент - The road to happiness with HIV

The road to happiness with HIV. Step-by-step guide

Tanita Totorman

MY STORY

My name is Tanita Totorman and it’s a pseudonym (well, you get the idea). At the time of writing, I am 38 years old, including 7 years in therapy. Although my parents raised me to be a good girl, it didn’t save me from a horrible diagnosis that I thought only zombies in basements had. When I arrived at the hospital, in a dying state in the stage of AIDS, I saw that all the patients, including me, were really like zombies at that moment, except for a couple of beautiful girls who seemed to have arrived there by mistake, and from that moment on I began to immerse myself in reality and to gather information from living experience in bits and pieces. I’ll be honest, no one even talked about happiness there, especially since the dying were done every other day. But those two girls who looked so beautiful interested me a lot and gave me hope that I could look like them, no matter what my status was. The secret of these girls was a completely different quality of life, their spirits were high, smiles on their faces and a blush on their cheeks, and both of them had been HIV positive for a long time. As I got to know them, I learned that one of them had never taken any therapy because she was able to control her CD cell count by increasing it through a healthy lifestyle, my doctor confirmed that there are indeed such people with mild virus, but they are the exception to the rule, unlike me and 99% of other people. That’s why I write!

ABOUT A MAJOR MISTAKE

When a person first learns that he or she has HIV, he or she is convinced that the blood test was a mix-up, that this cannot happen, or that it is a universal conspiracy of a non-existent disease to put people on medicines. And the most important mistake a newcomer makes at this moment is to refuse therapy and not to go to the AIDS center. Both cases lead to serious complications and inevitably to death, and I was convinced of this in the hospital. When I was already normal and the number of CD4 cells was like that of a healthy person, I decided not to take the therapy for one month (to take a break from the pills, so to speak), and not even one month passed when I came to the hospital in a dying state with unbreakable fever, having lost almost all CD4 cells. Please do not repeat these mistakes!

STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

The book has 8 steps. Read, Study, Apply. You will have to work hard, of course, but if you start doing them consistently, or even in any order, you will get results!

STEP 1 «ACCEPTANCE»

The first thing you need to do is to accept yourself with the new lifelong status of the disease; to understand and leave in the past the mistakes that made it happen; to accept the inevitability of changing the usual way of life and, most importantly, to want to improve it. Start and it is important not to skip the therapy! It is not necessary to be depressed that life is over and will not be the same. This is partly true, but for me personally, this illness was a forced stepping stone to a better life and a better version of myself. Of course, my acceptance did not happen the moment the doctor told me, but the next day, after I realized, I realized that now I had a good reason to start changing my lifestyle for the better, because I dreamed of being completely healthy.

And since I was very weak in the beginning, I couldn’t work under normal office conditions. I found a remote job and this option made my life easier in many ways, which also made me happy.

STEP 2 «STOP BAD HABITS»