Living with AIDS:
HIV-Positive Teens Tell Their Stories
by Denise Dowling
Thirteen-year-old Missy Milne of California contracted the virus from a blood transfusion she had as a baby. Her parents knew she was positive since Missy was five but waited to tell their daughter.
Missy is soft-spoken and seems naive about the full ramifications of being HIV-positive. Or else she has fully accepted her condition and refuses to let it control and alter her life. She seems to view her bimonthly doctor visits and medication as merely an interruption in the routine of her typical 13-year-old life of video games and dating.
"My parents told me when I was nine. We didn't want to tell my friends right away," Missy explained. "We wanted to educate them first because if we didn't, we thought I'd get teased."
"For four and a half years we were very silent," Missy's mother Joan said. "We lived in a dual world. We were afraid that when we went public, the car tires would be slashed, the doors would be spray-painted. But we haven't had one negative incident."
Missy's friends "treated her the same as always" and her (former) boyfriend had "no problem" with the disease either. "Sometimes when I think about boyfriends, I want the virus to go away," Missy said. "Because when you're older, some boys might not want to get involved with you because you can't ever have sex without using a condom. "
For Missy, what's good about having the virus is that she gets to meet famous people. She's spoken to John Stamos on the phone and once met Hillary Clinton. She worries about dying "only sometimes, at night." Sometimes she gets mad at God for giving her the disease. But the hardest thing has been watching her friends die.
"Missy said to me, 'Mom, how come all my friends are getting sick and dying and I'm not?' " Joan recalled. "She said, 'I feel like I'm on a train and each one of my friends is a car and I'm the last one.' "
"Many kids find out they are HIV- positive through pregnancy," Dale Orlando, former director of the Fenway Health Center in Boston, has been quoted as saying. "Parents aren't educating their children about the risk because they still view it as a disease of somebody's else's kids. It isn't."
"Nobody wants the schools taking charge of their kids' sexual life," Orlando said, "and that is the way condom distribution is perceived. Everybody sees it as licensing kids to have sex. What they don't seem to understand is that kids are having sex. And now they're dying from it."
Ann advises female teens to buy their own condoms and learn how to put them on a guy.
"And be sure of yourself," she warns. "Just because he says he loves you doesn't mean he's going to be there when you're in the hospital. Find out if this is really what you want. Young people believe they're invincible. But the only person who can save you from this disease is yourself."
"I realize that abstinence is not everyone's choice," Stan says. "But if you're going to have sex, learn about safe sex and practice it all the time - not just some of the time."
