I sit here, at my computer, sniffling from a runny nose. This is the second time in the past month that I've been sick. I keep getting sick, even more so than before. I'm terrified.

I have had unprotected sex with four different men in the past year. The first guy, it was oral sex twice. He has had a blood test recently, and he's clean. The second guy, I'm 99% sure, is clean, and we had oral sex twice and anal sex once. The third guy, we had oral sex once. And I have no clue WHAT he might have had. I only knew him for a day. The last guy, we had oral sex once and anal sex twice. All I know is that he has had sex with 10 men in his life. He believes that he is clean, and I'm inclined to believe him, but it's just so hard...

I'm sick, and I don't know why. I'm scared to death that it might be AIDS, and I don't even know what I'll do if it is. I'm 17. I'm supposed to have an entire life left of healthy, adult relationships, and an integral part of that is sex. I don't want AIDS. It will ruin my life.

And I keep coming back to the fact that it's all, ALL my own fault. I could have used protection. I had some right there, in my pants. I just didn't want to stop what I was doing. I can't believe that I could have been that stupid. If I do have AIDS, I don't want any sympathy from anyone, because it is, in the end, the choice that I made.

The only thing that makes this any different from teenage pregnancy is that I'm only ruining one person's life... That doesn't make me feel much better though...


Months later...

I apologize for some of the parts of this node that people disagree with... I didn't mean to use clean in an offensive way - sometimes I use words and I don't realize their affect on people. You must admit though, it is right in a sense... You're just referring to the connotation of clean and dirty. Blood without HIV is clean of the disease, blood with HIV is infected. However, as I'm sure you know, I can relate to the pain caused by people who don't think before they use certain words.

Also, I disagree with the opinion that an infected person can't live happily. Sure, it makes things harder on you, but there's absolutely no reason that you should let that steal your happiness. Behave yourself like an adult, and take responsibility for what you've done, making sure you don't ever infect anyone ever again... But there's no reason that you can't be happy. If you've ever read The Stranger by Albert Camus, you might know what I mean by this. As long as you can find something in your life that's good, you can be happy. You just have to want it. (I doubt that's what Camus was going for, but that's what I took from the book.)

Don't bother complaining about the softlinks... The person who put it on here already looks like an idiot anyway, and the only reason that they do it is because they think it gets under our skin. The only reason they think that is because we complain about it every time.

I know that a disease is worse than pregnancy, but it really isn't that way for some people. Some people go through with the pregnancy anyway, even though they can't handle it, and even though they won't be able to care for the child like it needs, they have the baby anyway. And it ruins both of their lives. That's just the pessimistic view, though, and at the time that I wrote this node the first time, I was feeling very pessimistic. ^^; Sorry for the extreme subjectiveness of it.

And I know that straight people get AIDS too. But in general, it's thought of as a gay disease, and I must admit I was giving in to that stereotype a little. It's more likely that you'll get AIDS through anal intercourse than through vaginal intercourse, and I guess that's what I was thinking. In my mind, generally the worst result of straight sex is unwanted pregnancy, and the worst result of gay sex is AIDS, and that was the basis of my comparison. And I have to admit that the node title was mainly an attempt to get more people to read the node- but we're probably all guilty of that at one time or another.

And on a final, very happy note... I got tested, and I am HIV negative. Thank goodness. I definitely am going to be more responsible in the future. Right now, I have a steady boyfriend, and we used condoms until we both got test results back with good news. And we couldn't be happier. :) It might be a good idea to continue using condoms, sure. I know my boyfriend though, and I know that the chances of one of us getting an STD and not telling the other is somewhere between 0 and epsilon. Besides, we'd have to get it through a blood transfusion or something, since we're both loyal to each other. Those are odds that I'm willing to risk.

That is how the game is won! You must play the game to fun!