I am a loner and decided not to be governed by my HIV status. I told only three friends in Boston, three in California and my Boston doctor, arranging also to be tested and, if need be, treated, confidentially, in Washington. I’m too well known in town to amble through AIDS clinics and not wind up in the gossip columns. For six years I lumbered along, relatively healthy, keeping my HIV status private.
But in 1994, when I began to get undeniably sick with what I wished to think was the flu–some ““flu,’’ with my feet turning purple, my legs swelling up, my temperature shooting up, a hacking cough, nausea, dizziness, you name it–fear took over. I knew, at least subconsciously, that I had full-blown AIDS.
Denial. The greatest performance of my life was my self-delusion. I pretty much convinced others of what my denial had convinced me: that I merely had a lousy flu. Then, one night in October 1994, I passed out and was rushed to a hospital, barely escaping death by 20 minutes, or so the doctors said. I woke up nine days later looking like Frankenstein’s monster, with tubes coming into and going out of me. I was confused about where I was and what I was doing in a hospital bed. I know only that my denial propelled me so close to death that at one point during my nine days in coma, the doctors advised my friends that perhaps I should be taken off life support and allowed, peacefully, to go to meet my maker.
I spent two months at Massachusetts General Hospital, whose doctors saved my life, and at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, where the neuropathy that had paralyzed my feet eased and I began, slowly and painfully, to learn to walk again despite a neurologist’s opinion that I never would. Acceptance took over. A feeding frenzy in the local press, not unkind but curious, led not surprisingly to total revelation. Anybody who didn’t know I was homosexual was living in a time warp, but AIDS was a shocker.
I returned to my WBZ News Radio 1030 talk program in January 1995, 30 days after I was liberated from hospitalization, trying to make sense of the life I had led and remake it into something worth the bother for what I assumed would be a short future. When the national media found me of interest–conservative-libertarian talk host is gay and has AIDS–the once private David vanished. The New York Times, ABC, NBC, CBS, ““Oprah.’’ Even I began (almost) to tire of myself as I became a poster boy for living with AIDS.
One of my friends calls me ““Magic Johnson without the jump,’’ meaning the best-known AIDS guy in New England. I was back teaching media criticism at Boston University, back doing newspaper film reviews, back on the lecture trail, back to overdoing it. Broadcast from a home studio, my evening talk show, top-rated for years, soared even higher. The rallying around from friends, family, fans, strangers, was encompassing. But still it remained a countdown to oblivion, since once infected, once beset by any number of AIDS-related diseases, one died, right? I was determined to make each remaining day count. I established the David Brudnoy Fund for AIDS Research at Massachusetts General Hospital. And then, last spring:
Hope. Suddenly the new protease-inhibitor drugs, in combination with AZT and 3TC, two older drugs, showed phenomenal promise. After I started taking them last May, the amount of HIV in my blood dropped almost overnight from 140,000 ““copies’’ per milliliter to an undetectable level, and my CD-4 infection-fighting blood cells quadrupled, from nearly none to 71 (healthy people have about 1,200). My weight rose from 125 pounds in the hospital in late 1994 to 180 pounds. Exhaustion eased, though I’m still easily fatigued. A dizzying sense of optimism took hold. I avoid stress; I eat for two; I lift weights; I thrive; I sing of survival.
Maybe the new drugs will remain effective and hold my nemesis, HIV, at bay. I had long taken Woody Allen’s witticism as my motto: ““It’s not that I’m afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’’ I was resigned to death but fearful of the progression along the usual grim AIDS path. Now I believe a guarded optimism is justified.
Maybe those like me who are doing exceptionally well on the triple-drug therapy will live to see AIDS retreat from an invariably fatal to a usually chronic condition. Maybe researchers will make additional breakthroughs and even invent a vaccine that can rescue the Third World, where AIDS is now pandemic, and those in our world who are unable to afford these expensive therapies. Maybe what has seemed to be an unconquerable scourge can be vanquished.
I live with AIDS realizing that the experience has been not only phenomenally instructive but also, oddly enough, enlightening, enriching, life-enhancing and liberating.
