Vanessa (not her real name) has lived with HIV her whole life.
She was infected in the womb of her mother, an Indonesian who contracted HIV from contaminated needles while seeking fertility treatment in Batam. Her mother found out they had the virus only when Vanessa was three.
Much has changed since Vanessa shared her story with ST as a 10-year-old in 2011.
She no longer keeps a diary in which she professes her love for “everything in Old Chang Kee”. She did not become a lawyer or work in fashion, as she had dreamed of then.
Now, 13 years on, she is confident, mature and works in the creative industry. She wants to be financially stable so she can take her parents on holidays overseas.
Beneath these layers of self-assurance, Vanessa still harbours the same secret that she has since she was four, when her parents told her about her condition.
“I have never told anyone about my HIV status,” she says frankly. “I live just like a normal person. If you see me on the street, you wouldn’t think I am HIV-positive, right?”
She longs to confide in her best friend. “There are moments when I feel I have been through so much with this friend, maybe I should tell her.
“But I will pull myself back and wonder: Can we still enjoy the same friendship? Will she distance herself or treat me differently once she knows?”
While Vanessa’s condition is under control, she fears others would not understand.
“When you declare, you cannot add that you are stable, with an undetectable viral load,” she says. Vanessa has been receiving treatment since she was three. “People won’t focus on that. They will choose to see that I am an HIV patient.”
While she channels her energy into building a career and enjoys the freedom of young adulthood, she keeps the idea of dating, marriage and children at an arm’s length.
Fear, she admits, is a large part of her hesitation.
“If I ever have a partner, when will I tell him about my condition? Do I say it at the start and risk him walking away immediately? Or wait until things are serious, and then he may feel I have lied to him all along?”
She adds: “There is no right time to say it, and I can never be sure if he is the right person to understand.”
Vanessa believes people today are much more informed about HIV compared with in the past, when the condition was mostly feared and misunderstood.
But she remains deeply uncertain about whether others will receive her normally if she were to disclose her HIV status. Because of this, she would rather keep it a secret.
Nonetheless, she hopes that she can eventually live openly with her condition.
“I am not ready now, but maybe one day, if I know living with HIV won’t change the life I have built, I will tell my friends, ‘Look, we have been close for years – sharing meals and travelling together – but nothing happened to you.’”
Dr Ho Lai Peng, a medical social worker, notes there is some progress towards acceptance of people with HIV.
“As people with HIV live longer with better health outcomes, we hope for greater acceptance towards people with HIV in Singapore so that having HIV becomes a non-issue, like the way people share that they have diabetes.”
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Source: The Straits Times © SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproduction.
