After leaving Dr. Chanel’s office, I walked out in front of the hospital and took a seat on an unoccupied bench. The thick air was hot and sticky; it was about to rain. I put my head in my hands and began trying to process everything that had just happened. My throbbing eyes were moist, but not from tears. It was as if all of the tiny blood vessels in my eyes had popped and were now slowly leaking onto my eyelids. Dried saliva was caked on the sides of my mouth, and my hair felt like it was standing on end. If anyone had looked like a zombie in the AIDS clinic waiting room, it was me.
I thought of Heather. What would she say? Intuition told me it would be something supportive, although this scenario was so unusual I couldn’t be sure. I knew she was asleep, recovering from a thirty-hour shift in the ICU, so I opted not to call her. This conversation would need to be had in person. I looked down at my forearms and imagined the skin covered in abscesses, just like David’s. I pulled out my cell phone and scrolled through my contacts. Who should I call? Was this something I could mass-text?
Crazy needle stick at work. HIV scare. I’ll be fine. LOL
Probably not. I was suddenly hungry but the thought of actual food made me queasy. I wanted privacy but I didn’t. I wanted to blame someone but I couldn’t. I closed my phone and my eyes and tried to drown my fear in more facts from medical school. Needle sticks really weren’t that uncommon; there had been close to a million in the United States alone, and the people who jabbed themselves tended to be unlucky, not incompetent. My episode with David was an accident, a hazard of the job. A blip. A, dare I say, rite of passage? Maybe something similar had happened to the Badass.
I stood up and made my way toward the falafel cart.
A light rain began to fall as I placed my order. While the vendor drizzled white sauce and hot sauce on the cubes of chicken, my sense of comfort ebbed. There might be a lot of needle sticks, sure, but they were rarely with HIV-positive blood and they were rarely in patients with such a large amount of the virus swimming through their blood vessels. David’s blood had hundreds of thousands of copies of HIV in every drop, and for that reason Banderas had classified my stick as high-risk. So it wasn’t fair to compare my situation to the average jab, and it wasn’t fair to suggest that the Badass had gone through something similar—he was probably an intern before AIDS was even a thing.
I ate half of my falafel and threw out the rest. Part of me was anxious to return to the infectious disease wing—my unexpected absence would put a strain on my fellow interns—but Dr. Chanel had forbidden it. She was coordinating my treatment regimen with the pharmacy and said she’d text-page me as soon as the pills were ready. I took shelter under an awning and waited. Again I pulled out my phone, but I knew I wasn’t going to use it. I squeezed it in my right hand as I wiped my eyes with my left, inadvertently introducing hot sauce into my cornea. An occasional gust of wind blew the warm rain onto my skin, like a backyard sprinkler. As the drops of water accumulated on my hands and on my arms, I again envisioned the droplets transforming into hundreds and then thousands of tiny purple pus bubbles. I reached into my back pocket, pulled out the rumpled toilet paper the devastated young woman had waved away, and dabbed my moist eyes.
Eventually the text page from Chanel arrived. I walked across the street to the pharmacy and handed an Indian man the handwritten prescriptions. After I gave him my full name and date of birth, I wanted to say something else, something like “I don’t actually have HIV. This is all precautionary. You agree, right?” But I said nothing and waited.
Twenty minutes later I was on the southbound 1 train headed home with a large plastic bag containing all of my new medications. There were eleven pill bottles in all, including medications to prevent nausea and vomiting. Head in hands, I wondered what to say to Heather. I had to tell her, but how? And how would I respond if the shoe were on the other foot? I’d received frantic calls from college friends after “the condom broke,” but this was something altogether different. Heather and I had made a point of not talking about work at home, but that was about to end.
“Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen!” someone yelled. It was Ali, wearing suspenders and a top hat. My spiritual healer had returned. He headed in my direction and attempted to hand me another business card, but I waved him away. I didn’t want to see him or anyone. I didn’t want to touch anyone. And I didn’t want to tell anyone. I wanted to be completely alone and I wanted an answer. Did I have HIV or not? Banderas said I wouldn’t know for weeks. If the virus didn’t destroy me, the uncertainty might.
Emerging from the dank subway at Seventy-Ninth Street and walking toward my soot-stained building, I started examining the bottles of various pills Dr. Chanel had prescribed—ritonavir, lopinavir, tenofovir, darunavir, raltegravir. More comic book characters, all with extensive side effects profiles. Darunavir looked a bit like a football, burnt orange and oval-shaped, while ritonavir was an enormous pale capsule, a meal in a pill that an astronaut might carry. As I twisted the various pill bottles between my thumb and forefinger, I wondered if the medication causing diarrhea would be balanced out by the one inducing constipation.
When I passed a stationery store, I thought of Peter Lundquist and the heart he had drawn on his legal pad, the broken one without any names in it. The one that had brought me to tears. If I couldn’t keep it together that afternoon sitting with Denise and Peter, how was I going to deal with this? It was easily the most wrenching thing that had ever happened to me, the kind of thing you heard about happening to other people that made you thankful it wasn’t you. This wasn’t like waiting for some STD result after a drunken night out; this was a high-risk, life-threatening screwup that could potentially affect everyone I cared about and even those I didn’t. For the last month I had watched people in the hospital on the brink of death, but the stakes were always theirs, not mine. I wasn’t sure I was up to even waiting to find out my results. And if it turned out I had contracted HIV…well, I certainly wasn’t ready to think about that version of my future.
“Mr. Matt,” the doorman bellowed as I entered the lobby. “How goes it?”
I quickly stuffed the pills back in the bag and gave him a salute. “Terrific.”
As I waited for the elevator, my thoughts moved elsewhere. Could I have kids with HIV? Or would the act of conception put Heather at too great a risk? Fuck, I should know this. My mind wasn’t working properly. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure I knew how Heather was going to respond.
I started running through opening lines to say to her.
So, funny thing happened today at work…
Guess who gets to start using condoms again!
I might have AIDS and I would understand if you want to leave me.
I quietly unlocked the door and entered the bedroom. I gave her a light shake, but she was fast asleep. Maybe this could wait. I was terrified of telling her and was looking for an excuse to buy more time. I backed out of the room, but as I was closing the door Heather opened her eyes.
“What?” she asked, wiping sleep from her eyes. “What are you doing home?”
I smiled uncomfortably; words jumped out:
careful understand needle nightmare awful explain Carleton viral sorry
“Holy shit,” she said, throwing the blankets onto the floor. “Are you okay?” She bolted out of bed and stood just a few inches from me. “Are you okay?”
She hadn’t yet touched me. I wondered if she would. “I had an HIV-positive needle stick this afternoon. I was drawing blood and it just happened.”
“Oh my god.” She threw her arms around me and said, “Whatever happens, I want you to know that I’m here.”
“I don’t know exactly how it happened but I just jabbed the fucking thing. I don’t know if I blacked out or what.”
“Whatever happens,” she said, grabbing me more tightly, “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” I pulled back to look at her face. “I love you,” she said, giving me another hug. “I love you. Period.”
I stood dumbfounded. It was the most wonderful thing anyone had ever said to me. I reached for the bag of meds, about to show her my new reality, but thought better of it. She gave me another hug, and moments later we crawled into bed and I fell asleep with my hand locked in hers, like Denise and Peter.
I was unceremoniously awoken hours later by an urgent need to move my bowels. Stool vanity cast aside, I was curious to see if my excrement could give me an early indication of my viral status. Could I detect a subtle difference or was I being ridiculous? I wasn’t sure.
I thought of my friends and what they would say. But before I contacted them I needed to speak to my mother and father. I’d counseled patients on how to disclose an HIV diagnosis to partners but not parents. A few minutes later I had them both on the phone. A childhood spent watching TBS and Lifetime had taught me what to say next.
“Mom…Dad…are you sitting down?” I asked solemnly. “Because I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
I imagined them on separate phones, just a few feet away from each other in their living room, raising their eyebrows.
“I was drawing blood today and I stuck myself.” Silence. “I injected myself with HIV. Several hundred thousand—”
I paused. It occurred to me that my calculation was off—it was impossible to know just how many copies of HIV had been thrust into my finger. I didn’t remember David’s most recent lab results, and the number might be much higher than that. My parents started speaking, but I only caught fragments.
oh my love you safe when will why would job come home love walk away
My thoughts were somewhere else, trying to remember David’s exact HIV viral load. Wasn’t it closer to a million? Did it really matter? I returned to my parents.
“It’s been a nightmare, obviously,” I said.
“You know, Matty,” my dad said, his voice rising slightly, “I hate to say it, but this never would’ve happened if you were a dermatologist!”
It was one of the long-running gags between us and it always made me laugh; insulation from the vagaries of life was only a skin biopsy away. After some obligatory, mutual reassurance, I hung up the phone and crawled back into bed.