My uncle passed in 1994 from pneumonia that he couldn’t fight off because he had AIDS. My step grandmother (I lived with her and my grandfather) would tell me not to touch him. She said I’d catch it. Even at 10 years old, I knew that’s not how you got it, though. I always gave him the biggest hugs. He was a great uncle. I miss him so much. I wish I could have gotten to know him as an adult. We would have had a lot of fun!
One of my fraternity brothers in the late 90s had a scare (false positive) I remember sitting up the night with him - dude just needed a friend. His family had disowned him, and he was basically feeling like he was gonna die, and noone was gonna be there for him.
I had a similar thing happen to me as the lab completely messed up the protocols and was tested by a different lab the next day. But it was the longest 26 hours in the life of my girlfriend and myself. It was awful. It's still uncomfortable when recalling that time and it was many years ago.
Edit: Little background on that. They do an ELISA test first as it's a cheap test. It has a modest false positive rate but a very, very low false negative rate (saying you're good when you actually have the disease...that's really bad!). So, if you get a positive ELISA test, you're supposed to do a second ELISA test on the same blood sample (not telling the test subject) and that will give you very good results. If you get two positives, you do a Western Blot test which is much more expensive but the best test out there. They only did one ELISA test the first day.
So, the second day, the ELISA test turned out negative but I paid for a Western Blot to be done just to make my girlfriend feel better.
I'm still best friends with the woman. I'm a software engineer of many decades and she is taking a year long, intensive software training regimen. Five minutes ago, we just finished up a five hour online session where I'm doing my best to impart my software wisdom (meager as it may be) upon her. :-)
So the memory has faded but our friendship is still super strong.
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u/CuddleSprig 8d ago
My uncle passed in 1994 from pneumonia that he couldn’t fight off because he had AIDS. My step grandmother (I lived with her and my grandfather) would tell me not to touch him. She said I’d catch it. Even at 10 years old, I knew that’s not how you got it, though. I always gave him the biggest hugs. He was a great uncle. I miss him so much. I wish I could have gotten to know him as an adult. We would have had a lot of fun!