Living with HIV - a Personal History Part 2/2

This video from StuartProduction, Kevin Tillman talks about his life with HIV part 2/2.

Female: You're watching an RH Reality Check Production brought to you by rhrealitycheck.org. Kevin Tillman: You have people who loose friends and family over HIV, literally they will just turn then out of hope. I spent many in hour on this front deck here talking people down. And helping them try to work through the initial shock of finding out their positive later on. How to talk to their partners or their parents or their sons and daughters or whatever, for some people telling people that telling someone else that they're HIV positive can be just as hard or worst in coming out as being dead. You know this people, this folks became my friends. And it gets to be a lot when you loose a lot of people. My partner Eric at that time was also working with—. He was just—he was great and really helped me, help me grow as a person. Help me learn what love meant and he helped me work through a lot of stuff. I mean how love is important for him. We we’re going to married you know the whole bid. Yeah, you'll find people who are going to be supportive and I made sure that I had a support group around me. And it’s tough, but you don’t—I'm in it alone. I've had a lot of dating problems a long time. It’s really hard to find a serious partner. Everything is fine until you know in some cases until they actually find out that you have HIV and then it’s like “Oh, we can be friends. Bye”. That gets pretty hard after four or five times. The way I see the nature of HIV and aids now is in contrast to them. There is more education out there. So a lot of what I went through people don’t go through but still have the same attached to it. What hasn’t changed is that people are still struggling. Their still struggling with their families and with their friends taking their meds because not all of the meds work for everybody, different people have different side effects. The one thing that I would want people to know about HIV, is that HIV is not just about a virus it’s about people. And that though, that virus doesn’t necessarily care who it affects or who it infects. And the people with HIV a lot of them are hurting and they need people, they need support. Treatment is great, having a doctor is great but in a lot of cases HIV will get you if people, if you're stressed out or if you're afraid all the time. And one of the biggest things that helps break that fear is if person with HIV cannot reach out to somebody and know they're not being judged or condemned or anything it’s just to be able to have somebody who listen and try to understand what's going on. I think that makes all the difference in the world. Am I afraid of dying? Consciously probably not, I feel confident in my faith that there is rest, grace and mercy waiting for of us. Though there are regrets I think I kind of made peace with them. But I’m thinking I'm pretty good. I mean I think I’d be alright.