Long day, with babbling.
Sep. 9th, 2002 11:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaI spent most of today scrambling to get our poster presentations together for the 2002 International Meeting of the Institute of Human Virology. Two trips to art supply shops, four 26x44" pieces of medium-green posterboard, one horrified discovery that it would not be possible to cut the posterboard, three frantic adhesive searches, twelve informative and carefully color-coordinated graphs (because if beige is associated with lower risk on graph 1, it should still be associated with lower risk on graph 11, or people will get confused), twenty-nine powerpoint slides nicely coordinated with the graphs and the posterboard, four trips to the color laser printer on the fifth floor, three fingers stuck together with a borrowed gluestick because I left the spray fixative at home, forty copies of a handout for each poster in case anyone wants to take my deathless prose home, ten p-values, eight of them under .05, and innumerable petty wording arguments with my boss. (I can't believe that I'm not allowed to say "unsafe" or "unprotected" in a presentation about condom use.)
I wrote this post on the back of a NIAID announcement for a "Fellows and New Investigators" workshop in Banff (No, I can't go. It's not for the likes of me.), sitting in the back of a hotel ballroom listening to a lecture on HIV-fighting vaginal microbicides, waiting for the general sessions to end so it would be time to go stand by my poster and be ignored by microbiologists. Ordinarily, at these things, very few people have any interest at all in behavioral research. Most of them are basic scientists - they work with HIV at the test-tube level, not at the level of whole patients - and so what we do doesn't usually get their attention. But we go anyway, because we think that everyone who does HIV research should be interested in behavior, whether they know it or not. And because the food is usually good.
So when I scribbled this post down I wasn't expecting much. But during the hour and a half that I stood by my poster, eight or nine people stopped and wanted to talk about it. That's a damned respectable number for something like this - it's certainly as well as I did at my last psychology conference poster session. And one of the people who stopped by was about to enter medical school, so I got to get my Words Of Wisdom in right at the outset of her career. ("Talk to patients about behavior. The patient's behavior sets an upper bound for the effectiveness of medical interventions - because it doesn't matter how good your treatment is if the patient won't take it, and it doesn't matter how good your advice is if the patient can't follow it.")
I was so frazzled by the time I finally got to the hotel for the conference, after running around desperately all day. I was driving my 12-year-old Toyota Rustbucket, tastefully accessorized with a cracked windshield. I pulled up to the front entrance of the lovely and elegant Marriott Waterfront, and the doorman was instantly there opening my back door for me and loading my posters onto a luggage cart. He never gave the slightest hint that he was really more accustomed to the Lexus crowd - he just said, "Ah, a poster presentation! You're with the virology people," wheeled my things inside, and passed them off to the bellman. At that point I had the mortified realization that all I had in my purse was a $20 bill - no change for a tip. I said so, apologetically, and tried to take my poster back from the bellman. But they were having none of it. "That's okay, don't even think about it," said the doorman. "No, please, it would be my pleasure," said the bellman. And he carried my poster up two long escalators to the conference registration desk, and made sure I noticed the view, and smiled at me later when I came back down. And on my way out of the hotel four hours later, the doorman asked me how my presentation had gone. Those guys made my day.
And they also made me realize that I've been driving this rattletrap car to fancy hotels and restaurants in Baltimore for a couple of years now, for conventions and drug company-sponsored dinners, and I've never had a doorman or valet parking attendant bat an eyelash at what I was driving or at my harried, down-at-heel appearance. They're always exquisitely polite and helpful. They never appear to notice that I don't look like I belong. It's not what I would have expected, but I find it utterly charming.
Tomorrow I'm in the clinic, as usual, after an early morning doctor's appointment. The thing on my breast is starting to look barely perceptibly better. It's still large and red, but the edges and the color are fading a bit, and it's stopped throbbing. Hopefully in the morning it will look even better, and she'll tell me I don't need to have a mammogram after all.
Wednesday I'll go back to the meeting - that's the day they talk about treatments, so I may even understand most of it. I'm glad the meeting's at a different hotel this year - I hadn't realized it would be, and I was really dreading being in the exact same place and doing the exact same thing as when the World Trade Center was attacked. After the meeting, I'll have dinner with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
curiousangel, and we'll go to church, and I'll light a candle for the people I know who are still feeling the effects. Including myself. I won't be reading the news or watching TV. And then hopefully after that I'll settle down again.
I wrote this post on the back of a NIAID announcement for a "Fellows and New Investigators" workshop in Banff (No, I can't go. It's not for the likes of me.), sitting in the back of a hotel ballroom listening to a lecture on HIV-fighting vaginal microbicides, waiting for the general sessions to end so it would be time to go stand by my poster and be ignored by microbiologists. Ordinarily, at these things, very few people have any interest at all in behavioral research. Most of them are basic scientists - they work with HIV at the test-tube level, not at the level of whole patients - and so what we do doesn't usually get their attention. But we go anyway, because we think that everyone who does HIV research should be interested in behavior, whether they know it or not. And because the food is usually good.
So when I scribbled this post down I wasn't expecting much. But during the hour and a half that I stood by my poster, eight or nine people stopped and wanted to talk about it. That's a damned respectable number for something like this - it's certainly as well as I did at my last psychology conference poster session. And one of the people who stopped by was about to enter medical school, so I got to get my Words Of Wisdom in right at the outset of her career. ("Talk to patients about behavior. The patient's behavior sets an upper bound for the effectiveness of medical interventions - because it doesn't matter how good your treatment is if the patient won't take it, and it doesn't matter how good your advice is if the patient can't follow it.")
I was so frazzled by the time I finally got to the hotel for the conference, after running around desperately all day. I was driving my 12-year-old Toyota Rustbucket, tastefully accessorized with a cracked windshield. I pulled up to the front entrance of the lovely and elegant Marriott Waterfront, and the doorman was instantly there opening my back door for me and loading my posters onto a luggage cart. He never gave the slightest hint that he was really more accustomed to the Lexus crowd - he just said, "Ah, a poster presentation! You're with the virology people," wheeled my things inside, and passed them off to the bellman. At that point I had the mortified realization that all I had in my purse was a $20 bill - no change for a tip. I said so, apologetically, and tried to take my poster back from the bellman. But they were having none of it. "That's okay, don't even think about it," said the doorman. "No, please, it would be my pleasure," said the bellman. And he carried my poster up two long escalators to the conference registration desk, and made sure I noticed the view, and smiled at me later when I came back down. And on my way out of the hotel four hours later, the doorman asked me how my presentation had gone. Those guys made my day.
And they also made me realize that I've been driving this rattletrap car to fancy hotels and restaurants in Baltimore for a couple of years now, for conventions and drug company-sponsored dinners, and I've never had a doorman or valet parking attendant bat an eyelash at what I was driving or at my harried, down-at-heel appearance. They're always exquisitely polite and helpful. They never appear to notice that I don't look like I belong. It's not what I would have expected, but I find it utterly charming.
Tomorrow I'm in the clinic, as usual, after an early morning doctor's appointment. The thing on my breast is starting to look barely perceptibly better. It's still large and red, but the edges and the color are fading a bit, and it's stopped throbbing. Hopefully in the morning it will look even better, and she'll tell me I don't need to have a mammogram after all.
Wednesday I'll go back to the meeting - that's the day they talk about treatments, so I may even understand most of it. I'm glad the meeting's at a different hotel this year - I hadn't realized it would be, and I was really dreading being in the exact same place and doing the exact same thing as when the World Trade Center was attacked. After the meeting, I'll have dinner with
curiousangel, and we'll go to church, and I'll light a candle for the people I know who are still feeling the effects. Including myself. I won't be reading the news or watching TV. And then hopefully after that I'll settle down again.
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no subject
Date: 2002-09-10 10:58 am (UTC)It's a tough question to answer.
Oh jeez, yeah. Huh.
I think I would probably say something like: "If you mean, is there a way that you can have sex with an HIV+ partner and be 100% sure that you won't get HIV, then no. It's not 100% safe. But nothing is 100% safe, and every person needs to decide on their own how much risk they're willing to accept.
"If I were trying to make that decision, I would want to think about a lot of things. I'd think about whether I really loved this person and was sure that we were ready for a serious relationship, because I wouldn't want to take on extra risk for a casual relationship. I'd think about whether I could trust myself and the other person to use condoms every single time. If I'd had trouble with that in the past, I might think that maybe I shouldn't get started in a relationship where messing up would be so dangerous. I'd think about whether we were able to communicate about sex. I'd think about how well their virus was under control. I'd think about whether I wanted to get pregnant, because it's not safe to do that with someone who's HIV positive. And I'd keep in mind that there are a lot of ways that people can love each other and be sexual with each other that don't involve intercourse, so I might want us to move in that direction instead.
"So I guess you can tell that I think your question is pretty complicated. I don't think there's one answer that's right for everyone, so it can be a good idea for someone who's trying to make that decision to speak privately with a person who knows a lot about HIV and can help them sort out the specific details of their situation."