Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.

Bill came over tonight to finish my dress. All that's left is to add a little bit of lace around the neckline, which I'll do myself. It turned out...
( well, see for yourself )

An interesting request.

Wednesday through Friday I was at a work-related conference. The Institute is developing a new protocol for HIV treatment involving observed therapy, and the conference brought together doctors, nurses, public health people, psychologists, social workers, peer advocates, community organization leaders, and patients, to discuss how this should best be done.

On Friday, some of the patients there approached me. They're putting on a weekend retreat for HIV positive heterosexuals, and they wondered if I'd be willing to come and give a talk about dating. Huh. I'm really quite pleased to be asked - it seems like a compliment, given that they'd been talking with me for a couple of days, and it's certainly an interesting topic. But I'm also not entirely sure what I'm going to say.

Some of the things that come to mind:
- loving yourself and accepting your HIV as a (probably) necessary precondition to finding someone else to love and accept you.
- refusing to accept bad treatment from a partner just because you think no one else would have you.
- disclosure: why secrets are harmful, why early disclosure is better than late disclosure, why your reasons for thinking you don't have to tell your partner are pretty much all flimsy rationalizations.
- educating your partners about HIV and being patient about the time they need to become comfortable with the information.
- broadening your definitions of a sexual relationship and being more creative about sexual interactions, so that you can focus on lower-risk activities without decreasing your total enjoyment.
- why you still need to worry about health risks to yourself, even though you're already positive.
- pros and cons of only dating other people who are HIV positive.

I'm expecting that, even though they presented it to me as a "talk," we'll want to structure it to include a lot of group discussion. After all, they're a lot closer to being experts at this than I am. I really think this is going to be fascinating.

Wow!

Our spirituality study is the lead article on the Institute of Human Virology's website! Even if it doesn't mention my name... that's so cool!