Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [105]
Many times in Steve’s and my relationship, our sex life has had to be packed away. His meds have often been to blame. One drug dried his skin so terribly that his lips bled, making kissing out of the question, and others, designed to free him from physical pain, distanced him from good sensations. Over the years many of his prescriptions have come with the warning label THIS DRUG MAY IMPAIR YOUR ABILITY TO OPERATE MACHINERY, without ever noting that the machinery included his own.
But the body usually gets used to drug side effects over time—if there’s time. The most difficult period for Steve came during our third and fourth years together. During a long bout of wasting syndrome, he’d steadily lost a frightening amount of weight and, as he now reflects good-naturedly, his libido went down the toilet, too. On his doctor’s orders, I began giving him regular injections of testosterone enanthate, not to help him reclaim virility but just so he could hold on to some of his mass. Still, he got so thin that he could no longer wear the ring I’d given him on our first anniversary. Everything began to change for the better, finally, thanks to new medications. Steve’s T cells rose, he gained weight, the color came back to his face, his appetites returned. We had no idea how long he’d remain stable, which, as I see now, gave sex an intensity that was bittersweet. This might just be a reprieve, I thought, just a short break of sun. To this day I’ve never been able to shake that feeling.
The first time back out can be a little awkward at first. Naked, you feel unusually exposed. Skin is the body’s largest organ, a marvelous complex of nerve endings, sweat glands, and the tiniest of blood vessels, the capillaries. At any given time, about one-quarter of the body’s blood flows through the skin. Even so, it may take a moment to warm up, to get the blood moving. My partner and I remove our clothes and reach for each other as if underwater, two bodies meeting at the bottom of a pool. Pushing against resistance, we kick our legs to stay in place, hold our breath, close our eyes. Just as we make contact, we surface, mouth to mouth among the waves.
THIRTEEN
Memory Cells
SHORTLY AFTER STEVE AND I BEGAN LIVING TOGETHER IN early 1990, we cemented our coupledom by making deposits into a joint savings account. The money wasn’t earmarked for a future vacation or a down payment on a home. This was our cure fund, a stash of cash set aside for the day the magic bullet would be discovered. We knew Steve’s health insurance wouldn’t immediately cover a brand-new treatment, no matter how miraculous. And for some strange reason, we both felt sure the cure would be found overseas. On a moment’s notice, we’d have to board a plane to who knows where. Steve thought it might be Japan. I thought France. Hungry for news, we attended the monthly Project Inform updates held in a church in the Castro. As in an old-fashioned town-hall meeting, anyone could stand up and speak, share treatment success or horror stories, or ask questions of the evening’s guest—a visiting doctor, usually. Oftentimes, though, lively debate devolved into medico-babble few of us in the creaking pews could follow.
I remember how, in June of that year, everyone was talking about an “amazing” and “promising” experimental therapy called hyperthermia, or blood boiling. Sure, it had only been tried on two people, but the basic science behind it sounded pretty solid. The opposite of hypothermia—the condition suffered by people who plunge through thin ice—hyperthermia mimicked a high fever, the body’s infection-fighting mechanism. The procedure involved withdrawing the blood from an AIDS patient’s body, pint by pint, using an apparatus