“How long have you been wasting?” the chiropodist asked me a couple of weeks ago as she updated a history on me. The starkness of the verb, however accurate, stayed with me. I’ve always been thin, I said, but my weight has been falling a bit since last fall. Fast
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My journey with AIDS...and more!: Another important day for self-acceptance
If I have learned nothing else about my bipolar II today, it is that I am certainly not the only one in similar circumstances who has found photography to be a healing past-time. Facebook is teeming today with some of the creative works of the bipolar support community.
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Another important day for self-acceptance
If I have learned nothing else about my bipolar II today, it is that I am certainly not the only one in similar circumstances who has found photography to be a healing past-time. Facebook is teeming today with some of the creative works of the bipolar support community.
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: DARE ME – and help raise funds for the Stephen Lewis Foundation
I realize it’s been many months since I have blogged. (You’re more likely to find me on Facebook or Twitter.) As my HIV has to compete with everything else that ails me, and those activities which bring me relaxed pleasure, it takes a special occasion to spring me into action
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Review (and a personal retrospective) – Behind the Candelabra
With only the most scant help from Google I have been trying to remember more about my personal, professional meeting with Liberace (“Please, call me Lee.”) It was some time in the mid-1980s, while I was working at a St. Catharines, Ontario radio station, when the subject of last night’s
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Lunch with Vito Russo
Disclaimer: My memories have been assisted by Google and a piece of paper, 8-1/2″ x 11″ divided in half, on which is written the following: After signing up for The Movie Network again recently, I came upon the film “Vito: A Man For All Seasons”. I was immediately transported back to
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Early morning, April 25, 2007
A prompt this week to write about something in a health-care context brought out this story which, despite having been told over and over in my head, had heretofore not made it down in writing. It wasn’t quite 5:30 am and Janice was already waiting for me on the main
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Re-visiting Windigo ( a poem I wrote about a place I loved)
I know I’ve posted this before but I ventured to submit it to Northern Cardinal Review, an online magazine I happened upon today: Windigo Ripples lick the rocks As the pines and birch politely applaud Gulls catching their petits déjeuners In the waking lake. Sky’s amethyst shroud cascades
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: There are at least a few, if not many, important people with whom I need to have my own conversation about…
…this! It’s certainly not too early to think about Mental Illness Awareness Week When I read the Ottawa Citizen article (linked above) I immediately thought, “Mom will have read that yesterday,” and what an opening it would give me to discuss my own mental health history with her. Not long
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Oh look! It’s happened again!
I’m delighted to be at the top of the list, perhaps it’s random, of 16 Five Star Rated AIDS Information Sites & Blogs – and I’ve found a few fellow travelers in the process!
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: My 1,000th post! (with help from The Equality Mantra’s “A Letter to My Sons”)
What I really like about this is that it could just as easily have been said by my Mom or Dad. (They said and wrote almost exactly similar sentiments when Craig and I came out 31 and 35 years ago, respectively.) So there you have it, according to WordPress and
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: AccolAIDS much appreciated!
Healthline editors recently published the final list of their favorite HIV & STD blogs and I’m pleased to let you know that this blog made the list, which can be found here (in no particular order). I am very appreciative of this vote of confidence! Kenn Chaplin is no defeatist;
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Ashley Berges to link with My Journey with AIDS
Not one to scan this blog’s activity logs too often, much less understand them, I was quite chuffed to be contacted by Michelle Lamont, representative of Ashley Berges – author, life coach and radio host in Dallas. She/they apparently find me inspiring! That being Ashley’s stock-and-trade, we are in discussions
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Five Years Since a Critical Day One
It was an early night to bed on Tuesday, June 19, 2007. I had absolutely no more drinking to do and decided that the last day of this particular spring was a bitterly appropriate day to reach out for sobriety. Ruminations of suicide the past few days signalled to me
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Nine years older nine years later
It’s been so long I had to look up what SARS stood for (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). That was part of the underlying score as I spent five weeks in two hospitals starting nine years ago early this morning. Why was I laid up? Well an item from Montréal in
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Scanned: my first post-positive lab results
I found this in a plastic-covered folder in my Rubbermaid file drawer: My physician at that time, the late Ed Kamski, ordered these tests as a baseline after giving me the results of my “positive” HIV-antibody test. (He also told me that a blood sample taken about a year earlier,
Continue readingMy journey with AIDS...and more!: Ending the week on a positive note
I checked in with my doctor today to get results from my latest blood tests and the news was all good! CD-4: 310 (up from January) viral load: undetectable Hemoglobin A1c: .063 Weight: 144 lbs. So I’m good again until June, by which time I’ll have had some more routine,
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