Begona Fernandez |
Madrid (EFE).- Iván Garrido was born with HIV 32 years ago, but that circumstance that in 1991 sounded like a death sentence overcame it against all odds, and today as a psychologist and activist he wants to end fear and invisibility and spread a message of empowerment because HIV, she says, is the “best gift my mother left me”.
In an interview with EFE, Iván, who has participated this week in a conference organized by the pharmaceutical company ViiV HealthCare on the stigma of HIV in invisible populations, explains that his mother was a drug addict because of what she spent in childhood with her maternal grandparents who, before the lack of treatment for HIV, they only expected him to enjoy a few years of life that were spent with long hospital stays.
At the age of five he entered what he calls the “AIDS phase” which was when the virus began to kill his defenses (CD4 cells) and visits to the hospital began to worsen and become more and more frequent, specifically to Carlos III in Madrid. , a reference center for infectious diseases where he was even in the pediatric ICU.
Passion for hospitals: “I felt at home”
But Iván was lucky that antiretroviral treatment was approved at that time: “the famous AZT, the first medicine for people with HIV infection, a pharmacological challenge that had many side effects”.
And from those long stays his passion for hospitals was born: “I felt safe, I loved them, it was like being at home, sometimes I made up that I was sick so they would send me to the hospital and admit me,” he confesses.
However, until he was 12 years old, he did not know that he had HIV. She “She was very gossipy and she always read the medication leaflets and in all of them one word was repeated: liver, so she believed that they had to give me a transplant”.
Iván remembers that one day at school he announced to his classmates that he was going to die “because he needed a liver transplant and he was not going to arrive on time.”
Since she talked so much, her grandparents decided to explain to her that she had HIV, “that it was a disease that cannot be cured but from which she was not going to die” and her response was to cry from stress because her “plans had changed”, and despite his age had already “normalized death”.
In the 1990s, a child with HIV took 35 pills a day.
From those years the many side effects he suffered from pharmacology assailed him. Iván remembers vomiting, diarrhoea, neurological problems such as insomnia and osteoporosis. All this due to a very strong medication that consisted of 36 daily pills and two syrups.
“I hated taking all that medication, I hit my grandparents, insulted them and begged them to let me die, it was very hard for them too,” he admits.
Iván saw his mother die when he was 7 years old, he was by her side in the last minutes and today, after psychological reconstruction work, he admits that “not everyone has the opportunity to be by the side of the person they love the most in his last minutes.
From the age of 10 the virus began to stabilize but the bullying began. “The harassment came because of my sexual orientation and the pen, I was very different from the rest in gestures and behavior,” she explains.
However, the stigma due to HIV was not noticed abroad, but at home. “My grandparents raised me not to say anything, they repeated to me that I would have no friends, no partner in the future, no job and that I would get used to that situation,” he says.
And that insistence was a revulsion and over the years Iván wanted to show his grandparents, who have already passed away, that he would shout “from the four winds” that he had HIV and that no one was going to tell him anything about it, “I got it”, he assures.
In 2023 the prognosis for a child with HIV is “very good”
In the last three decades, the HIV situation in the pediatric population has changed drastically. The pediatrician of the Gregorio Marañón university hospital, Luisa Navarro, assures EFE that the prognosis today is “very good” and “children who have started early with powerful drugs do not have encephalopathies, nervous system disorders or any type of organ involvement ” .
“They grow normally, they have puberty at the right time and their life expectancy is normal, the same as the rest of the population,” he adds.
Currently there are 270 children with HIV followed up in pediatric units throughout Spain, with an average age of 14 years.
Although the population under twelve years of age still cannot be added to the dose of one pill a day as adults do, the prescription has nothing to do with that offered in 1991.
Today a child with HIV solves his pharmacological regimen with three pills a day or two and a syrup. They are simplified as much as possible so that there is adherence.