A Mother’s Resilience: One woman’s Journey with HIV
“Don’t stay silent. Speak up,get treatment and move on with your life.” Those were teh words Maya Kate’s mother told her in 2005 when the 24-year-old lost her husband to Acquired Immuno deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). That year changed everything for Maya. She not only lost her husband and, days later, her newborn son, but lived with the fear that she would be the next to die-leaving her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter without parents.
This World AIDS Day (december 1), Maya, now 44 and a peer counsellor at Bel-Air Hospital in Panchgani, Maharashtra, draws strength from her own story even as she navigates second-line treatment that has kept her free of disease complications. The girl from Pune married in 2000 soon after Class XII and had a daughter within a year. Her husband, then in his late 20s, frequently fell ill with fever, fatigue and recurrent herpes from 2003. They discovered his HIV status only when Maya became pregnant and underwent routine tests. “My test was positive and doctors then asked my husband to get tested. That’s when our journey with the virus began,” she recalls.
Fighting a stigma and more
Back then,the couple knew very little about HIV. Her husband insisted that she tell no one. “There was so much fear and stigma. AIDS meant death,” Maya says. But the burden of secrecy was crushing, and she finally confided in her mother. At the time, Maya was living with her husband’s family in a village near Wai in Satara district, coping with his deteriorating health and the growing weight of her own diagnosis.
In 2005, her husband died of AIDS. A month after childbirth, her newborn son died too. Maya was inconsolable. “I kept having nightmares that I would be the next. I lived only for my daughter,” she says. With grief and uncertainty overshadowing her life, she turned to Bel-Air Hospital in Panchgani, which was then at the forefront of HIV care during one of the country’s most challenging phases.
Her initial CD4 count was 450 cells/mm (normal being 500-1,500). Though frequently enough depressed and weak, she did not have severe physical symptoms.She accepted Father Tomy Kariyilakulam’s offer to volunteer at Bel-Air. He encouraged her to share her story with critically ill patients to help them cope. But as her CD4 count slipped to 250, her resolve began to waver.
how ART added years to her life
In 2007, she was put on antiretroviral therapy (ART). “My weight had dropped to 38 kg and I couldn’t keep food down,” she recalls.