David Patient is a far cry from the days when he was a coke-snorting disco diva in Las Vegas, hobnobbing with the likes of Liberace, Rock Hudson and Elton John.
He has swapped his spangled jumpsuits and big hair for practical jeans and golf shirts, and has chosen to settle down in Nelspruit, Mpumalanga, where he is building a retreat to provide group training sessions about HIV and Aids.
Patient is one of the world’s longest-lived HIV survivors (23 years and counting) and the condition has made him completely self-possessed and comfortable in his own skin. “What other people think of me isn’t any of my business,” he says.
He has survived enough bigotry for two lifetimes: first for being gay, secondly for having HIV. And while his first reaction was to leap off a mountain when he heard that he had what was initially called “gay-related immune deficiency” in 1983, he now says HIV is the best thing that has ever happened to him.
“I’m not saying, ‘Go out and get HIV, woo hoo!’ But it’s made me who I am,” he explains.
Patient’s epiphany on Mount Charleston outside Vegas, where he planned to plunge to his death on July 4 1983 after being given six months to live, sounds almost biblical. “I don’t know if it was the drugs, my own mind or God, but three times I clearly heard a voice in my head saying, ‘You’re not going to die.’ So then I thought, ‘Fuck you all, I’m going to live.’ In all disaster stories there’s a survivor, someone who survives a plane crash or the plague. Why couldn’t it be me?”
This was a turnaround from his earlier, rather morbid fantasy of committing suicide and making everyone sorry for spurning him.
And he knew lots of people. He had been part of the elite gay scene and was director of the glitzy, all-suite Regina Maris, a charter ship for the rich and famous. At just 22, he had already made $400Â 000. But Patient had a history of toying with death, and he shows off twin sets of about two dozen neat, white lines that run across the insides of both his arms — evidence of multiple suicide attempts during a troubled youth.
“That was just drama, drama, drama,” interjects his partner in life and business, Neil Orr. “It was all in his head. Instinctively, he knew what to do to survive.”
Orr, a research psychologist, has made it his life’s business to learn the secrets of long-term survivors of diseases such as cancer and Aids, and Patient is his ultimate guinea pig. “I married my work,” says Orr.
They met in Cape Town in 1994 at what was then the only HIV clinic in South Africa, the Aids Support and Education Trust. Patient was smuggling antiretrovirals into the country and the clinic was finding doctors to prescribe them.
“I’d come back to Africa to save the Africans,” says Patient with a laugh, before assuring that he has lost his Messiah complex, if not traces of the American accent he picked up while in the United States.
“I thought he was a brash, loud-mouthed American,” says Orr. “I wouldn’t talk to him, but he insisted on filling in one of my research forms, so of course I was interested, and he invited me out to dinner.”
Five dinners later, they were pretty much a couple and they have spent the past 12 years travelling mainly in Africa and the East, to conduct group training and writing books about psycho-neuroimmunology (PNI), which is essentially the principle of mind over matter.
Along with good nutrition, PNI has kept Patient strong. He celebrated his 45th birthday on March 13 and his most recent blood test results indicated that his viral load was non-existent.
He has only been on antiretrovirals for two years and started using them because he wanted to have a child and needed to get his viral load down to prevent infecting the surrogate mother during artificial insemination.
“But it didn’t work out,” he says. “She couldn’t fall pregnant. We are now considering adoption.”
When asked what it’s like to be among few people in the world to have lived with HIV for so many years, to be a universal anomaly, to have successfully created a symbiotic relationship with one of the world’s most feared diseases, Patient ponders for a while.
“It can be overwhelming at times, but also very humbling,” he says. Each year on the anniversary of his Mount Charleston epiphany, he makes a point of “meeting” with the virus and renewing their “agreement” that if the virus doesn’t kill him, it can continue to exist.
“I nearly forgot this year until Neil said, ‘Happy anniversary,’ and then I said to the virus, ‘You’re OK, I’m OK, let’s not rock the boat.'” — African Eye News Service/Lowveld Living