After a surgery mishap, Brittney contracted HIV when she was nine years old. Brittney, not her real name, has been living with HIV for 21 years. Growing up with HIV navigating friendships, relationships, university and now a new mum, HIV has never held her back.
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Episode 2: Brittney’s StoryTranscript / Show Notes Heather Ellis:Hi, I'm Heather Ellis your host on Our Stories: Ending HIV Stigma, a podcast by women living with HIV where we share our stories of our diverse lives and challenge the myths and stereotypes that feed HIV stigma. Our stories is part of the women in HIV tell the story project made possible by Gilead Sciences and produced by Positive Women Victoria in Australia.
Brittany's story starts in Melbourne, Brittany, not her real name, has been living with HIV for 21 years. At just nine years old, she contracted HIV due to a mishap from major surgery as a child. As a teenager, then a young woman navigating relationships, university and a career, and now a new mum, HIV has never held her back. Welcome, Brittany. And thank you for sharing your story on Our Stories: Ending HIV Stigma.
Brittney:No worries. It's my pleasure.
Heather Ellis:You were telling me that your parents told you when you were 10 years old. I imagine you knew very little of HIV other than the occasional news report on TV. What were those early years like for you as a child?
Brittney:Oh, it's funny. You mentioned the occasional news report, because coincidentally, just a couple of weeks or so before I was diagnosed, I actually read an article in the weekend paper profiling some people that had recently been diagnosed and the headline was: I will survive. And so that was pretty much my understanding, I knew that it was a virus, and I knew that it was a big deal to some people, but I was also being told, this is not a big deal. This is not a death sentence. Everything should be normal for you when you grow up. So it was kind of reconciling those two differing opinions and those mixed messages that I was getting was probably the major thing that was going on for me at that time.
Heather Ellis:So how did your parents tell you? Did they sit you down and say, “Oh, we have something to tell you?” How did that go? What was your memory of that?
Brittney: It was all a little bit dramatic in terms of the circumstances in which we found out and we got a phone call from the hospital. And, and so from there, it was basically just straight into the car to the hospital to have the test. And so the bits of information that I got from them were sort of small pieces. And eventually, I think we were told, not negative at some point, but we weren't told positive for a little while either. So there was a little bit of a limbo period in there as well. And so I can't really remember the conversations I had with them, but I was kind of learning as they were. We were all sort of getting that information at the same time.
Heather Ellis:That news would have been so shocking for your parents for their child to be diagnosed with HIV. But like you're saying, you were all on this learning curve, and I imagine it brought you so close together. During your childhood, did you find that you had this was a really stronger relationship with your parents and having their support?
Brittney:Yeah, and that continued through life, because I've been able to say, the amount of time and energy and love that has gone into that part of my experience. I mean, it's gone into all of my experiences with my parents, but that, in particular, I was able to see their need to protect me and to sort of witness the things that they were doing and saying. I did have a little bit of an issue in the earlier days with the fact that we weren't talking about it as much as I thought we should be. I think it's difficult as a child and an adolescent to find the right outlet for those kinds of conversations. And the focus was very much on just, I'm a normal child, everything is normal, we'll just go on as normal when there were moments where I really wanted to be able to sort of sit down and say: “look, this isn't normal. This is really . You know, let's talk about it”. And I almost felt like I deserved a bit more sympathy than I got. But in hindsight, I think they did everything exactly the way that I would do it if I had to go through that again.
Heather Ellis:Oh, imagine that your parents were really wanting you to have a normal childhood because of HIV stigma and effective HIV treatments were discovered in 1996. So this was two years after you were diagnosed. Did you go on treatments immediately after you were diagnosed?
Brittney:I did almost straightaway. So I think I was diagnosed in July and started medication the following month, and I'm really, really grateful for that. I didn't have any serious issues with the medications that