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Anya, 1995.
Anya
August 22, 1995
Anya's Apartment, Sunset District, San Francisco
Meredyth: How is it that you discovered BAY Positives?
Anya: Right after I found out I was infected, two years ago, in July of 1993, I got the phone number from AIDS hotline. A woman at BAY Positives offered to give me the numbers of a few women who were HIV positive. I knew Antigone from high school so when I called her it was like, "Hi this is Anya; do you remember me from high school? Guess what..."
MW: What was your life like before you tested?
Anya: After high school, I did a lot of traveling alone. I went to Europe twice and to Israel. These trips helped give me clarity about how serious I was about going to school to study psychology. I got 3.7s and 4.0s, for three and a half years. I had one more year of school; it was right before summer. Toward the end of finals, I was falling in love. I worked at a restaurant and had an internship at a psychiatric unit. I got tested because David and I were not one hundred percent with condoms and we were talking about birth control.
I didn't have a lot of partners between the time I was seeing Michael, who was positive, and David, and ninety-eight percent of the time I used condoms. I went two and a half years from my last test, when I was just out of the relationship with Michael. I put it off because I was scared.
I was pretty sure that I was negative, and David and I were getting sick of using condoms. It was clear that we weren't going to be seeing anyone else. I thought I could go on the pill. I didn't spend the time after I got my blood drawn thinking about it all that much. Even on the day that I went to pick up my results, I thought, "He'll drive up on his motorcycle, and we'll go off and have lunch." It was a beautiful day.
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