But we both decided that we would go for a test together. So off we trundled. And this, this was in [name of small city]. Off we trundled to the [name] Hospital to have our tests. And his came back positive, and mine came back negative, again. And funnily enough each of those negative tests’ After my friend had told me that he was positive, each of the negative tests, actually I, I didn’t really believe it could possibly be negative. Because of the things that wed been up to. And it was just infuriating. I just thought, well, theres no way that that can be negative. It must be a case of waiting for seroconversion. That’s in retrospect. But I thought I, I obviously haven’t yet produced antibodies. I didn’t at that time fully understand what seroconversion was. So anyway, wed gone for our test together. This was [name of partner] in [name of small city]. And his came back positive. Mine was still negative. So they immediately called me back in to redraw the blood and retest. And it came back as a new positive. So I, I know roughly within a couple of weeks when I seroconverted. And that was April 1986.

I was reading a sort of Ian McEwen novel in bed’ on a Friday night in late April and I had a bit of a sore throat. And the next morning I woke up and I felt a bit tired and I still went off to the gym and I really noticed that I you know, I wasn’t anywhere near’ I didn’t have anywhere near my normal strength. And then the next morning I was very, very fluey and I though you know, it is probably just flu, and it carried on for a week’ I was in bed for a week. Hearing this program on radio 4 about HIV and it wasn’t about seroconversion illness or anything like that. And it had this doctor on about how easy it probably was to catch and how, the couldn’t rule out it had been spreading saliva kind of thing and this Swedish doctor. What a load of bollocks that was. Anyway, but then anyway I started coughing and it went into the second week of illness and I still wasn’t getting any better. And you know looking back on it I had all the things, it was a sore throat, I got a terrible headache and I sort of got slightly better and then I got’ it’s like a sort of pain in my chest and I started coughing incredibly badly, really, really deep coughing. And you know vomiting big thick gobbits of blood because I was coughing so badly. And it was a bank holiday weekend and all my fucking friends went away. Which it was like you know, and everyone thought I was getting better so they all went away and I couldn’t swallow because the pain in my lungs was so bad. And I ended up going back home to my mum and dads’

My diagnosis wasn’t so much a shock because I knew pretty much from elimination that I probably was HIV positive. I was sexually assaulted in March of this year a month before I was due to move to London. One of my little weekend visits turned into a bit of a Rohypnol nightmare. So from that point to this it’s, it’s quite an interesting sort of road really, that I’ve sort of come up. But I started to seroconvert the week leading up to Christmas, which obviously I didn’t know at the time, I just thought it was flu, but it was one of those flus that you just couldn’t move, just laying about, just being pathetic. And phoning friends to do your shopping and all of that’

All I could do is replay in my mind how I had contracted HIV. I was seeing my partner for nearly a year and he wasn’t aware that he had it.

I had been tested yearly and was fine until February of 2000.

By July of that year I was infected and by late August I had gotten mononucleosis but it still didn’t occur to me that anything was wrong until my partner began showing symptoms of shingles and his doctor told him it was very strange for him to be in his early thirties and have shingles. He was told that he should be tested for HIV and when he found out he was positive then I instinctively knew I had contracted it as well.

I was listening to the radio. And there was aoverage of a, of a conference on. And I suddenly had this awful remembrance of a drunken night in town. And thinking, bastardIf it wasn’t that, itnbsp;

And then I remembered that Ithat neither of us had had a rubber. You know, and it seemed like a good idea. I don’t do sex drunk. Normally. That was 54 years beforehand. And after that I’d come out in anBut I’d never even heard of seroconversion.

I’d come out with an enormous rash IEverything that, that I’ve subsequently learnt was to do with seroconvertion.

And I think oh my God. How canHow did I get this thing? That’s what I said to myself. And then I said, ‘I’ll never know, really, wh- how I got it. Because I was once married. It could be that I had it even before the blood transfusion. It could be. It could be, it could be from my partner. Who knows? Because don’t, I don’t know, really.

But we just thought probably it’s the blood. Because that, that did seem the obvious thing. But I’ll never know really thewhere it really came from. And I said to myself, by the way, ‘Even if I know where it comes from, wherehow I got it, it’s useless. Theres no point now. It’s too late now. I’ve just to think and get on with my life.

Well as I say it’s my husband, maybe he is not the one. I think it is the clinic, maybe it is not the clinic. Or maybe it’s your ex-boyfriend you met before because sometimes it can stay in your system for years without coming out. So it’s very difficult to pinpoint and say it’s this one. And that is the question we always get when we go to some of the GPs, the GPs, the question they ask you, ‘How did you get it? Do you know who gave it to you?’ It’s so annoying, its so annoying. You know, when someone is asking you that silly question ‘How did you get it?’ I went through that a long time ago when I was diagnosed and you know the memories still come back and the wound is open again. It is so awful. And they should understand thatAnd if I knew I was going to get it I think I would have run away from HIV, because I would know that HIV is coming. But I didn’t know. I didn’t buy it!

I said about the way I got HIV, and were going back over 15 years now, and to a different world. I had a friend who’d been looking after his partner in the [name of Charity] for a long, long time as he died. And we were, young, much younger. I found him very attractive. I went to the funeral finally of his partner, and we had a fair bit to drink at the party afterwards, then the two of us went out for dinner nearby here. And we had more to drink and sort of came home between the two of us on three legs here and’ and it was a sort of And remember of course I assumed’ I knew, I assumed that I had HIV at the time. And I knew he had, and we were sort of comforting each other really, it was a sort of Very affectionate, very intimate session of comforting after the funeral of his partner. And actually we had a lovely night! But I was certainly exposed to infection and’ and in’ of course in proper time afterwards I had my seroconversion illness. I never told him that I’d got HIV, he died not all that long afterwards. I felt very much that it was certainly nothing that I could blame him for. That it was a joint misadventure and it had actually been lovely, being together that night. The HIV was a most unfortunate consequence.