My Life After Now - By Jessica Verdi Page 0,61

breezed through the door.

“Hello, Lucy,” she said, and sat down behind the desk. “I’m Dr. Vandoren.”

She was in her early fifties, with shoulder-length dark hair peppered with eccentric streaks of gray. She wore blue-framed glasses and had a red ribbon pinned to her white coat. Most importantly, though, she was looking at me, wearing an inviting smile. I already liked her heaps better than Dr. Jackson.

“Hi,” I said shyly.

“I understand you saw Dr. Jackson last week?”

“Yeah.”

“What made you request an appointment with me then, may I ask?”

How was I supposed to explain? I couldn’t very well tell her how revolted I was by the man. They were probably friends. “I…wasn’t exactly…comfortable with him,” I said.

Dr. Vandoren smiled and nodded understandingly. “Yes, he’s not known for his bedside manner.”

“That’s an understatement,” I muttered.

To my surprise, Dr. Vandoren laughed. “Well, I’m glad to have you. Let’s get started, shall we?”

I nodded.

“Can you tell me the circumstances surrounding your contraction of HIV, Lucy? It helps me to know your background. And please know that anything you tell me will be kept confidential.”

The appointment continued on pretty much like that; it was more of a conversation than an interview, and Dr. Vandoren would respond to certain things I said with questions of her own, occasionally writing things down for her notes. She spent a long time talking with me—I didn’t feel like she was in a rush at all.

Then she got to the results of my tests from last week. “You are currently in what we call Stage I of HIV infection, Lucy. If you have to have the virus at all, that’s where you want to be. You are asymptomatic, and your CD4 count is just over five hundred. Are you familiar with the term CD4?”

I shook my head.

“You may have heard of T-cells?”

“Yeah, I have.” I didn’t add that the only thing I really knew about T-cells came from listening to the Rent cast album a million times.

“Well, the CD4 is a kind of protein on the surface of the T-cell, which is a white blood cell. In people without HIV or AIDS, the normal CD4 range is usually between six hundred and twelve hundred. The lower the CD4 count, the less capable your immune system is of fighting off infections. When the count drops to below two hundred, that means the patient’s condition has progressed to AIDS. We aim to keep the CD4 count above three-fifty in our HIV-positive patients. So the fact that yours is above five hundred is very good news.”

My mind was frantically trying to keep track of all of this. It was a lot to try to understand, but I would take this any day over the way Dr. Jackson spoke to me last week. At least Dr. Vandoren was treating me like an individual capable of actual thought.

“We also ran the RNA viral load test. When you have HIV, the virus actually makes copies of itself while inside your body. The lower the virus levels in your system, the better. The higher your viral load, the quicker the HIV progresses. This is why it’s important to always have protected intercourse, even if your partner is also HIV positive. You can pass it back and forth to each other, which causes the virus to replicate exponentially.”

Whoa, I didn’t know that. I’d figured having HIV was kind of like getting pregnant—once you had it, that was it. I didn’t know you could keep getting infected over and over again. The thought was…upsetting.

“Your RNA viral load count came in at over one hundred thousand, which is fairly high, but don’t get too concerned.”

Fairly high? Too late, I was already getting concerned.

“The count is always higher in the initial months after infection, because the HIV is just taking hold in your body and it’s reproducing at a rapid rate. Within the next couple of months, it will decline and level off.” She paused. “Do you understand all of this?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Don’t hesitate to ask questions if you think of any, okay?”

“Okay.”

We moved into an exam room, and she did a physical on me. The entire exam process was a lot more comfortable than last week. Dr. Vandoren told me what she was doing and what she was looking for and asked me about myself. She seemed genuinely interested in knowing who I was as a person, not just a patient. Then she asked the nurse to get my parents, and told me to get dressed and meet back