By, Hayden Donnell, North Shore Times, March 11, 2008
Contracting HIV seemed impossible to love-struck 16-year-old Jewel Grimshaw.
"I thought it was a gay disease. I didn’t know the H in HIV stood for human," says the Birkenhead woman.
Now in her early 30s, Ms Grimshaw has been living with HIV for more than a decade.
She contracted it during a three-year romance that started when she was 16.
It wasn’t until after the relationship ended in 1996 that she even considered the possibility she might be infected.
A test done in 1997 found she had been living with the disease for three years without knowing it.
Her former fiance was tested a few months later and diagnosed with full-blown AIDS.
He had been living with the disease for about a decade.
"I just went into complete shock," says Ms Grimshaw. "Then I was angry, then it went to sadness. Then I thought: 'Oh I’ve got to live my life’."
Unlike many women, Ms Grimshaw decided to go public with her diagnosis.
She talked about it openly, even with people she didn’t know well, and attended several support groups who helped her.
Although that degree of openness isn’t for everyone, telling the people closest to you is important, she says.
"I actually told most people that I met.
"Now I regret that but I don’t, because it means I can talk about it.
"A lot of women keep it from their families, keep it from their friends.
"I think it’s quite disgusting they feel they have to do that."
These days Ms Grimshaw is in a long-term relationship and doing a course at Northern Business College in Takapuna.
She doesn’t think of herself as a victim and holds no anger towards the man who gave her the disease.
"At first I’d live my days thinking: 'Oh, I’ve got HIV, I’ve got to live with it’. Now all I think about is: 'Oh, I’ve got to take my pills’."
Her positivity and willingness to talk about the disease has helped her become one of the faces of the national Positive Women campaign.
It is aimed at removing the stigma of HIV and making New Zealanders question their assumptions about those living with the disease.
She wants to help shape a New Zealand where those with the disease are no longer shunned or discriminated against.
"I’ve had to deal with a lot of rejection. People freak out – they don’t understand.
"There is a group of us who got together to try to stop the wrong ideas and the wrong treatment out there."
Almost 2500 people have been diagnosed with HIV in New Zealand since 1985.
Positive Women say the total of those with HIV is closer to 4000, of whom 400 are women.
The rate of heterosexual HIV infection in New Zealand has increased over recent years, to the point where in 2006 it outpaced the rate for homosexual and bisexual men.
Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/4433604a20475.html
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