Aboriginal AIDS Awareness Week shines a light on HIV rates among indigenous people

published on November 27, 2013 in Straight.com

VALERIE NICHOLSON REMEMBERS the room going silent the day she received her diagnosis.

After the doctor told her she had HIV, she was sent to another room to receive her medication, a place that she recalls as “the most scary thing in my life”. And after the initial revelation, she didn’t absorb anything that followed.

“I remember sitting there: I didn’t hear a word she said,” Nicholson recalled in an interview with the Georgia Straight.

It would be another two years before she began taking regular treatment for HIV, a result that she attributes to barriers to accessing information and education about HIV at the time.

“I was literally on my own,” she said. “I fell through the cracks.”

When she did return to seek medical treatment, fearing a lecture, her doctor simply told her: “Valerie, let’s get started.”

“There was no ‘Why haven’t you been here in two years?’ ” Nicholson noted. “I was really near death, and she saved my life.”

Nicholson, an aboriginal woman, has since devoted her time to working with others facing similar barriers, and is currently helping to recruit and survey HIV–positive women as part of a study of the factors that can keep them from accessing care.

Yolande Cole
Straight.com
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Aboriginal AIDS Awareness Week shines a light on HIV rates among indigenous people

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