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I’ve wanted to do a profile of my good friend Mary for HealthCentral for a long time and finally the stars aligned. She’s a strong, smart and very funny woman. We got introduced by LynnM, who’s a long-time reader of my blog, as well as also being a good friend. I’m a lucky woman…

“Being HIV-positive is not an easy life. What happens if you add RA to the mix? How does your HIV status impact your RA treatment? I recently interviewed my friend Mary Turner from Charleston, S.C., who’s lived with HIV since the late 1980s.

Mary is one of the longer survivors of HIV. “I was infected in 1985 when I was living in New York City.” This was in an age where HIV was only found in gay men and drug users. At that time women’s biggest worry about being sexually active was unwanted pregnancy. For most, birth-control pills to care of that concern — condoms were unnecessary. In the late 1980s, however, that changed when women began to get HIV. Mary got a diagnosis of being HIV-positive in 1988 and says that doctors “believed I was one of the first five or ten upscale, professional women in New York infected with HIV who was not an injecting drug user.””

You can read the rest of the post here.