Help AIDS Survivors Overcome Trauma

Read "'I Spent Decades Planning to Die.' What It's Like to Survive HIV for More Than 30 Years" my article in Time for #WAD2017 #HIV #LongTermSurvivors  By Tez Anderson



Imagine being in your twenties and being told you have two years to live. You watched your loved ones and community die in huge numbers. Attended so many funerals they are all blur. 

Then imagine NOT dying but thinking you will at any moment for 25 or 35 years? Now you are aging with HIV and living a life you never expected, much less planned for.

Let's Kick ASS—AIDS Survivor Syndrome is a national grassroots movement of HIV Long-Term Survivors, honoring the unique and profound experience of living through AIDS epidemic.

What It's Like to Survive HIV for More Than 30 Years
In 1986, I moved from Atlanta to San Francisco because I had fallen in love with a man who lived here. The HIV test had come out a year earlier, and he knew he was negative, so I walked five blocks down the hill to the clinic and took The Test. Two weeks later, I was told it came back positive for HIV. I immediately made an appointment with a respected HIV doctor who told me I had less than two years to live. I was 26. It would be a few years before I figured out that I had acquired HIV in 1983.

From 1981 until 1998, having HIV was considered a “death sentence.” I witness my loved one and a huge swath of my community die young—all the while fully expecting to be the next one to die. At the end of the two years, I was still physically healthy, so he said I would be lucky if I lived another two years. It went on like that for a decade. Along the way, I watched my T-cells dwindle and had AIDS-related illnesses, all signs of certain death. I lived at death’s door so long, it was all I knew.

I certainly had no idea then that I’d live long enough to be a long-term survivor, or live to be a 58-year-old man. I’m aging with HIV, and I am not alone. I am in the majority. As of 2015, nearly 50% of all people living with HIV/AIDS in the United States were over 50 years of age. By 2020 that will rise to 70%. It is a paradigm shift in the demographics of HIV. It is also another frontier that no other generation has explored.

Read the rest on Time.com 
http://time.com/5044760/hiv-world-aids-day/

In 2013, I founded Let’s Kick ASS-AIDS Survivor Syndrome, a nonprofit to both raise awareness about AIDS Survivor Syndrome and seek out solutions to overcome it. A small group of other activists and I held a town hall in San Francisco on September 18, 2013. Over 200 people attended.

While we had ample anecdotal evidence to support the existence of AIDS Survivors Syndrome and experts who agreed it is real, we did not have research data to back it up. That changed in November 2017, when Let’s Kick ASS held a town hall entitled “Research on the AIDS Survivor Syndrome: New Data from the Multi-Center AIDS Cohort Study (MACS) and Voices of Survivors Themselves.”

The organization is dedicated to reclaiming lives, ending isolation, and helping long-term survivors envision a future that they once might not have dreamed we'd live.

We're continuing to raise awareness about the half-million people who came of age during the 1980s and '90s when having HIV was considered a death sentence.

We announced the results of a study on AIDS Survivor Syndrome, coined by our founder, Tez Anderson. The short version is that is real and that 25% of older adults are living with something they do not understand. Read the article about the results http://bit.ly/ASSresearchevent


WE UNDERSTAND

Visit https://LetsKickASS.hiv to learn more.
Watch this short Public Service Announcemnt Video


HELP US REACH OUR GOAL OF 9,000
Our goal is to address the psychosocial, mental, and behavioral determinants of health and illness among long-term survivors everywhere. Our focus is to help heal the trauma of those who survived the AIDS epidemic by strengthening survivors' resilience. We are building a community, and ultimately making survivors'' lives a better, emulating the same togetherness that brought people together at the height.

We are raising funds to support a much-needed intervention. A possible solution to overcoming AIDS Survivor Syndrome.

Raising money for an older population in a youth-obsessed world has been challenging. Please donate anything you can. We are doing incredible work on a shoestring budget. We have no paid staff, so all donations to support our work. Much needed support groups led by professionals who are also survivors. Exercise classes for older adults living with HIV.

More broadly we've built a large online community and inspired chapters in four other cities.

We need YOUR dollars to continue our work. Every little bit helps.

We envision a world where long-term survivors aging with HIV thrive into long, healthy, dignified, engaged, meaningful and productive lives, free from stigma, ageism, and discrimination.

They are the heroes of AIDS epidemic and are just barely getting by, sadly too many have given up and ended there lives because they felt hopeless.

LET'S PREVENT THAT FROM HAPPENING AGAIN.