Saturday, October 24, 2009

Blue Pills - A Positive Love Story **1/2

By Frederik Peeters.
Translated from French by Anjali Singh.
Swiss Edition Published by Atrabile 2001.
English Edition published by Houghton Mifflin Company 2008.

This is apparently a memoir about a guy that meets and a girl that has HIV. He falls in love with her (actually he had always loved he but she just recently became single so they started dating) and accepts her HIV son as his own son. So it's basically about him learning to live with the disease and learning how to be an adult and a father under extreme stress. Once the condom breaks and he starts to freak out. They have to pay several visits to the doctor to insure that he is ok. And his girlfriend has extreme anxiety and guilt because she fears that she might infect him also.

I think one of the themes of this book is that it is, now, possible to live with HIV in a relatively safe way these days. Of course that wasn't the case 10 or 15 years ago, but things have changed. In one scene the doctor explains to the main character that it is a complicated system to become infected.

Most of the virus in concentrated in the sperm and blood. Since his girlfriend is NOT giving him sperm, he's relatively safe. There is some but less of the virus in a woman's vaginal secretions and even a pittance in her salive. The main concern is the blood entering his body. Sores can help the virus transfer this way, but even then it's complicated. Even if he does contract the disease, it can be erased/cured if it hasn't gotten to the glands yet. This is all from the doctor in the story.

I've also heard that timing is important. The more a partner has been on medications, the less chance of contracting it. If the HIV count is low, but still existent, in the partner, then it's difficult for the other partner to contract it. Of course certain precautions have to be taken. After all this is said, one would be a fool not to use a condom.

There is a symbolic section at the end of the book that I did not really get. He's riding a mammoth in which he has conversations about mortality and the illness. Perhaps it was just a graphic way for the author to convey some philosophical meanderings, but I had a hard time following it, and I enjoy philosophical meanderings.