Pandemic Confessions

With illnesses from which one does not fully recover, a phase transition occurs. There is a shift from majority to minority status, and the shift can be abrupt; from walking in the door for a doctor’s appointment with one status, and coming out moments later with another. At other times, the shift can take years, with the ebbing of majority status occurring gradually, as a person loses more and more normal functioning.

These shifts, the abrupt and the gradual, can occur twice for people living with HIV; the first at diagnosis, and the second with AIDS. We seldom think of what these shifts entail, until we find ourselves in the midst of the change in status, uncertain and afraid. Medical science has very few concepts able to account for the dimensional differences in these two states of being.

Another way to look at this is when a person becomes an exception to some rule, or when he or she falls through the cracks of the health system. Individual experiences within a system of protocols and procedures are insignificant and negligible, all too easily swept aside as errors.

Looking out from within, engrossed in an experience, a person does not see things the way the majority of people who’ve never had to consider themselves an exception to the rule will see things. In the throes of a majority to minority status transition, people become more and more estranged from the world they once knew, the longer they remain unrecognised as exceptions to the rules to which health systems abide.

There’s a moral to the story, but that’s a matter we’ve left to religion in science.

Image: Confessional boxes, Paris, 2017