#nieceanduncle

Twenty years ago this Sunday, (exactly twenty two and a half years to the day from my birth) my life changed forever. My niece Matilda was born and I had what I thought would be a routine HIV check up before visiting the newborn baby.

When the doctor examined me they said I was in no fit condition to see a new born baby and I was promptly checked into to an isolated room at St Bartholomew’s Hospital London.

I had been feeling unwell before my hospitalisation but the doctor in Hastings had assured me I was just adjusting to the new antiretroviral medication. Apparently this was not the case, I had full blown AIDS with symptoms which the doctors would later discover to be tuberculosis, pneumonia, peripheral neuropathy and a pericardial effusion (infection of the heart) among other things.

My sister hadn’t planned to have children but my HIV diagnosis had changed her mind. I felt convinced that I would die and my niece would fill the void that my death would leave in my family.

Within a week I was very ill, had fully lost the use of my legs, had extreme fevers and chills and was hallucinating due to the medication the doctors were trying out on me. At around this time another doctor came and told me that I was within my rights to turn down the medication they were prescribing me and I could be dead in little over a week if wanted. I was given the choice of death and in spite of it all, for the first time in my life I knew for sure that I wanted to live. If I could live one more year I would write a book. Maybe my niece might get to know me before I die, I might even live long enough to be remembered by her.

The road to full recovery was long but within a month the medication was effective enough that I was let out of hospital and told that I was well enough to hold my niece (see first picture). The book I promised myself I would write was called “Depravikazi” and was published in 2003 by Running Water Publications. At the Brighton book launch that summer I formed my first band “The Flesh Happening”, some of the songs I wrote with that band made it in to this year’s HIV / AIDS themed album “Night Sweats & Fever Dreams”.

Two decades on and Matilda is about to turn twenty, she’s an expert in ancient history and cultures and has some fantastic tattoos. I’m so glad to have been a part of her and her sisters lives, to know them and watch them grow up has given my life so much meaning, here’s to a great many more years!