Being HIV positive in the 2020s
By: Timothy Bartsch
Tags: Health, HIV AIDS, HIV, Humanity, Rock

Being HIV positive in the 2020s

Hi there, my name is T. I am an HIV positive musician who acquired the virus from my cello professor in 1996 when I was twenty. He did not tell me he had HIV. I was studying in Germany at the time, and just as my adult life was beginning, it was derailed. And, though life-saving medications (protease inhibitors) just came out that year, the doctors did not know how effective they would be, but they did know they had a lot of side-effects and were hard to take (e.g., nine pills a day, kidney stones).

HIV science has come a long way since.

I took the medications for two years after testing positive, but then stopped them because besides not being able to stomach the meds very well, I wanted to live my life again, and I also read a book by Dr. Peter Duesburg and became an HIV dissident. I did not believe HIV caused AIDS.

And, I lived! I quit classical music and joined rock bands in Vancouver, Canada, wrote a rock opera and produced it as multimedia stage production in 2005. Though it personally bankrupted me, it was extremely cathartic. I felt I could overcome this cursed life brought on me.

This newfound freedom was shortlived though. I fell in love with a seronegative beautiful (on the outside) lady, we dilly-dallied, but she broke my heart. I then moved to Toronto for the first time with a friend and struggled to replicate my rock opera’s Vancouver success in vain. I had no money, no credit, refused to teach music, and was in a negative headspace. My health was also starting to fail. I slept about two hours per night for an entire year, and by the end of 2008, I was starting to look like a skeleton, was becoming incontinent, and having trouble walking.

In March of 2009, my mother came and brought me back to Vancouver. A week later, feeling my life was a failure, in a delirium, I tried to slit my wrists. Fortunately, I was even too weak to succeed at slicing through my skin. I fainted and found myself in a hospital.

I spent the next six months in there, the first two in Palliative Care, and the next four in Acute. My time spent in the hospital changed me. I came out never taking a moment for granted again and had a new appreciation for life.

I also was now ‘disabled.’ One of the opportunistic infections I had ate the myelin sheath of my nerve cells, in the motor cortex in my brain and also my lower spine. Since then I use one or two canes to help me walk. I wish I could run again.

Ten years later though, I am still happy that I survived! U=U (an undetectable viral means that HIV is untransmittable) has been scientifically-verified in the last decade, so this means I can have unprotected sex without infected my partner. In 2015, I moved back to Toronto to find the professional members of the Southern Time Band, and by 2019 I found them. In 2017 I met my wife-to-be, and we will be having our first child in less than a month.

I want to give back. Why doesn’t everyone in the world have access to excellent health care and free HIV medications as we do in Canada? Still, nearly 1 million people die from AIDS in the world every year. This should not be. Why is there such inequality in our world?

The first song I wrote in 1997, ‘Southern Time’ addresses this very awareness and dream that our world does not have to be this way. The Southern Time Band (includes an HIV positive backup singer) is going to record our first studio album in the next few months, and then hopefully launch our first world tour. I am also in the process of creating the Southern Time Foundation which will target key populations where HIV and AIDS are still rampant around the world. We want to help meet UNAIDS’ goal of ending AIDS by 2030.

We need all of the help we can get, though. Please consider donating to our cause.

T

www.southerntime.ca

www.southerntimeband.com