COLUMN: "Risky Business"

First Place Winner, Health Opinion, 1992 Columbia Gold Circle Awards.First Place Winner, Health Opinion, 1992 Columbia Gold Circle Awards.From Tim Farrell's "Speaking Strictly for Myself," Spring '92 She returned to school for sophomore year, leaving the businessman behind in New York. Over the next two years, she dated and slept with three men in her class, one of whom became her steady boyfriend. None of these sexual relationships were safe: again, she was on the pill. Over Christmas break of her senior year, Amy fell ill and had a hard time recovering. Her doctor ended up ordering an HIV test which came back positive. Shortly thereafter, she confronted the businessman and confirmed her suspicion that she got HIV from him while she was in Manhattan. Amy had been walking around for two years not knowing she was infected. She then informed her current and all of her previous partners. Two of them -- the steady boyfriend and one of the guys she dated -- were unlucky: their test results were positive as well. Another true story: Last summer I lived in San Francisco with my sidekick Liz. Sometime around July, she and a friend rented a convertible and drove south to L.A. for the weekend to check out the club scene. On her summer vacations from college, Liz works as a model and hangs out with the California fashion crowd, so when she came back to San Francisco and told me all about how she met this incredible looking poster boy from USC and partied with him all night long, I wasn't at all surprised. When she finished filling me in on what a wonderful time she had, I asked her, "were you safe?" "I'm on the pill," she answered. "No condoms?" "Weeeeelllll, no." "Liz, you're out of your mind." "Yeah, yeah. Leave me alone." She thought I was going to leave her alone after that, but I spent the rest of the summer bugging her about how dangerous and careless she was being. I repeated Amy's story every so often so she wouldn't forget it. I suppose what a lot of straight college kids like Liz must wonder is, "Am I really at risk?" Indeed, I hear the chances of getting AIDS from heterosexual contact in a college population are relatively slim. But they certainly aren't zero, and they definitely vary from person to person. For example, I'll take a wild guess that, at Penn, having unprotected sex with a senior from New York City with an unknown number of previous sexual contacts carries more risk than having unprotected sex with a freshman virgin from Nebraska. And while Penn may not be Manhattan, it sure isn't in the middle of any cornfield, either. Sometime around December, Liz called me up just before finals and told me she was thinking of taking the AIDS test. It wasn't just the USC guy. It was more a general feeling of unease: while she certainly hadn't been promiscuous, there were definitely some unanswered questions that were beginning to keep her awake at night. She asked for my opinion. "Well, you're probably O.K., but yeah, do it. But wait till the end of January -- it's only been five months since Mr. USC and they tell you to wait six. Also, you don't want to do it during finals." Shortly after break, Liz called. "Hi. I just got my blood taken." "How'd it go?" "Fine." "Where are you calling from?" "A bar." "What are you drinking?" "Bloody Mary number four." "I've been there. You'll get through it. Relax." "Relax? I'm dying." "You're not dying. You're fine. Relax." "What am I going to do if it comes up positive?" At present, if you test positive, you can expect somewhere around 10 to 15 more years of life if you really take care of yourself, fewer if you're careless. But it's more complicated than that. My friend Brendan who is HIV positive says that although he tries his hardest to keep a positive attitude, it's still the first thing he thinks of when he wakes up and the last thing he thinks of when he goes to bed. You'll struggle with fatigue, depression and frustration. You'll sweat out sleepless nights, and wonder about every sneeze and cough. You'll ask yourself: is this cold, that flu, this cut or that scrape the beginning of the end? Shortly after my friend James developed full-blown AIDS his life became a daily battle. Before his death in October he warned me, "For goodness sake, be careful. Compared to this shit, anything else is a mosquito bite." Liz eventually found out she was O.K., although the experience of going through the test definitely changed her. It's a scary thing to do, but it makes many people ask themselves seriously for the first time, what if? Liz says that ever since she got tested, she has practiced safe sex consistently. One thing most people fail to consider when they ask "what if?" is their responsibility to their family. My mother once pointed out during a heated conversation how self-centered I was about my fear of AIDS. "Your father and I are planning for our retirement. What about us? In some way or another we would have to take care of you. It would ruin our lives as well. You also have a responsibility to us not to be careless." I recently heard about a female Penn student who in a short period of time slept with nearly every brother in a certain fraternity. ("Was it safe?" "No, she was on the pill.") What if one of those brothers had been HIV positve? What if she had been HIV positive? Most straight people I talk to on this campus shrug their shoulders at the possibility. If you are straight and sexually active on this campus, you cannot afford to ignore the possibility of becoming HIV infected. While the risks might be greater for gays than they are for straights, the stakes are simply too high for straight people to throw caution to the wind and depend on the odds alone. There are people dying out there because they relied on those very same odds. They say that the young don't obey safe sex guidelines because they think they'll never get sick; that the young think they're invincible. If that's your attitude, get over it. In California they have a support group called "Young Positives" for HIV positive kids aged 14 to 21, and their meetings are packed. You can get AIDS, and therefore it is your responsibility -- to your family and to yourself -- to be safe. If you're worried about the past, go get tested. What about your sexual partner? What is his/her sexual history? Has he/she been tested? When? What was the result? ASK. You have a right to know the answers to those questions. You're naive if you think people are going to offer that kind of information without being asked. And by all means, insist on condoms every single time. They may feel like wool socks in the bathtub, but face it, that's a small price to pay for your life. · Free and anonymous AIDS testing is being offered today in the Christian Association between 12:00 and 4:00 p.m. Tim Farrell is a senior American Civilization and Religious Studies major from Boston, Massachusetts. "Speaking Strictly For Myself" appears alternate Thursdays.