An AIDS mistake
At 18, Kaye Brown was ready for the world!The bubbly honour student was looking forward to life in the army. Last March, she signed up at a recruiting office in Houston and took a mandatory AIDS test. One week later, she learned she was HIV positive and the world was no longer a sure thing! "I was really, really angry," she says. "My career had been snatched away from me."
Though doctors estimated that she had contracted the virus recently, they recommended that she tell anyone she had had sex with in the previous year. The list was long. "It was easy for me to list the guys I had slept with," she says, "but when I counted 24, I was like, gosh!"
One former partner said, "But you don't look like you're that way."
Brown shot back, "What is that way? HIV doesn't mean that I'm dirty or low. It just means I made a mistake."
Brown blames only herself. "It makes me angry that I allowed this to happen," she says. "Choices I made have stolen away the choices that I might have had in the future."
Not only will her choices be gone but her life might be taken too if AIDS takes its normal course of development...
The virus that causes AIDS is known as the human immunodeficiency virus or HIV...
We have a choice. Certain behaviours are the major cause of spreading AIDS, among them is sexual promiscuity. Let's make a choice not to indulge but to abstain ... and the old message from God Himself is to wait until marriage. Make virginity your choice! Take the moral high ground! You'll be glad you did.
- from Moments for Teens by Robert Strand
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