DJ Fat Tony

DJ Fat Tony

DJ Fat Tony's mother found him unconscious. He was diagnosed that day

Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.

DJ Fat Tony had been in denial for a long time when his mother came to his house on a Tuesday and found him unconscious on the kitchen floor. She got him to hospital. He tested positive for HIV there and then, and they kept him in. He says he wanted to go home, and did not have the strength to go anywhere. He was in hospital about four months. By the time he was diagnosed the infection was very far along — he was told he had probably been living with it for around a decade, his viral load was enormous and his T-cell count had fallen below a hundred. He was put in isolation, in a room where staff came in wearing masks. He was also coming off drugs at the same time, which he thinks made the deterioration worse. The infection reached his brain. After repeated lumbar punctures he became ill enough that doctors put him into an induced coma to bring the swelling down. He was in it for months. He remembers coming round with his mother holding his hand and not understanding what had happened, and being told over time that he had pneumonia and had nearly died. What he says next is the part that matters most. It did not stop him. He came out of hospital and went straight back to his old life, thinking that since he had not died that time, he would die the next. He says he never dealt with any of it and carried on using because of the shame attached to it — and that he used the word HIV rather than AIDS because it sounded nicer. Asked how the shame gets smaller, his answer was simply: by talking about it, and making it open. He says he had not discussed it with anyone before he put it in his book. Nothing here is medical advice. HIV treatment today is very effective, and someone on treatment with an undetectable viral load cannot pass the virus on. Support for anything in this story is listed at the end of the page.

• Drug addiction
• HIV