The past six years have been marred by treacherously tumultuous hilltops and lamentably low, vehemently voracious valleys, all a torrential watershed result of my HIV/AIDS diagnosis in early 2002, which catapulted me into a stormy sea of relentless depression that has not ceased to drown me time and time again since temptations of suicide came creeping into the forefront of my thoughts.
Highlighted escapes from this extended, ongoing depressive period have to be my one-year scholastic sojourn abroad, when I studied Graphic Design and the Italian language in Florence, Italy at L'Instituto delle Belle Arti - Lorenzo de'Medidi, and my first two years in San Francisco, CA, when I was deeply involved with HIV/AIDS activism/advocacy and the theater arts. In Italy, I succeeded academically and was awarded highest marks for all students in my classes, winning first runner-up in the student design competition for my brand/logo design of invitations and brochures for the student art exhibition at the end of the year. Thanks to my innate capacity with language learning, I also advanced from third level intermediate Italian to eighth level advanced after only one semester of study.
My arrival to San Francisco, after Italy, was a difficult one, for I had no money, knew no one and was encumbered with all of my earthly possessions (i.e., three suitcases, a duffel bag, a carry-on, a laptop computer, a 35mm camera, a portfolio, etc.). After two weeks of meandering from one anonymous gay abode to another, sleeping on strangers' couches or in their beds, I linked up with a HIV/AIDS youth advocacy organization (i.e., Bay Area Young Positives) and a homeless/runaway youth advocacy organization (i.e., Larkin Street Youth Services). The two organizations together linked me to free medical care, free food, free housing and resources through which I was able to begin the process of applying for Social Security Supplemental Security Income (SSI).
Immediately after getting situated in my own Section 8 subsidized studio apartment (through LSYS, Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Coorporation [TNDC] & SF Housing Authority), I signed up for the "Hire-Up" Employment Development Program and the HIV/AIDS Prevention & Care Services Internship through Larkin Street, during which time I interned at Magnet Gay Men's Health Center in the Castro and became the first HIV-positive youth advocate member of the San Francisco Department of Public Health AIDS Office HIV Prevention Planning Council. Peter Carpou, the Art Programs Coordinator for Larkin Street and a member of the Board of Directors for a small, but very well-reputed alternative arts/theatre space organization in the San Francisco Mission District, call the Intersection for the Arts, awarded me a full scholarship to participate as the only amateur performance artist in a program there called "The Hybrid Project," where I studied in an ensemble setting the contemporary arts of acting, dance and spoken word or hip-hop. Combined, all of these activities kept me very busy and engaged, so busy in fact that I wasn't paying much attention to my deteriorating health. I was, however, regularly practicing yoga and seeing an acupuncturist as an alternative to medicine and as a way to keep my health primed.
Come to find out, a meek and measly common cold that I had let go unnoticed, had progressed into PCP pneumonia, and the night of the final performance for "The Hybrid Project," I got a major, wrenching pain in my neck (apparently from stress and too much activity). After the performance, I went home and stayed up all night practicing yoga, trying to get the creek out of my neck. At 6:30AM the next morning, I even went into my local gym to participate in the supervised yoga class, but the instructor was not there that day. The gym personnel opened the studio for me anyway, noticing that I was in dier need of some relaxation, stretching and exercise. I then continued to practice yoga there for three hours, until, when I was releasing from an upside down back bend, I felt my neck crack into a line straight against the studio floor.
At that moment, I saw a bright, glowing, blissful light and a tree with three branches and no leaves (a scenic device I recognized from Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which I had studied extensively in college). I was having an enlightened, spiritual awakening. I cried tears of joy and giggled in delight all at the same time. It was a beautiful experience. Then I left the gym and walked the streets of the Tenderloin for what seemed like hours, until I found "Felicity Fetiches," a lingerie & fetish boutique that sold drag-ware. I went in and spent five hours there, trying on various drag ensembles and discovering my hidden, unrealized passion for the transqueer art of drag.
After that, I went home, ransacked my studio apartment looking for God, and letting myself believe that I was a "Gift from God," sent to the world as a young AIDS-stricken, drama queen, gay prophet to announce salvation for the world's sickly and the second coming of Christ. I was experiencing a schizo-delusional psychosis that proceeded to last six months, until the pneumonia was defeated and I found the right combination of psychiatric medication to counteract the psychotic tendancies.
The psychosis continued until January 2005 and then was followed by a year-long, very serious bout of clinical depression. I became overr come with greif and anguish, wanting so badly to once again experience the bliss and creative enlightenment of my delusions but not wanting to lose my mind. While I was in the hospital for the pneumonia and the psychosis, my doctors were convinced that my sickness was the result of excessive use of crystal methanphedamine, but I swore up and down that I had never used drugs before in my entire life. I attributed the psychosis to the infilitration of HIV into my brain resulting from the tantric yogic experience I had had at the gym that one morning post-performance.
Unfortunately, the doctors continual heeds that I was a meth addict intrigued me about the drug. When I got home, after the psychosis was finally over and I had regained a sense of reality, I immediately began to seek out the drug, in hopes of reinstigating the blissful delusions. I found an attractive gay man who offered me crystal meth, and I was introduced to surreally intense sexual experiences. I immediately became addicted. The sex was incredible...unbelieveable, but the feelings of euphoria did not last. Eventually, meth just became an escape from my depression, a way to ignore my problems as I hoped again for the delusions to return. They never did.
In January 2006, I was going through withdrawal and the effects of my depression were seriously heightened, to the degree that suicide seemed a simple and easy way to end my suffering. I realized in a moment of saving grace that it was not the meth or the depression that was keeping me down, but it was my inactivity, do-nothing-ness and boredom that was troubling me. At the bequest of Curtis Moore, Executive Director of B.A.Y. Positives, I applied for a job as Administrative Coordinator with Folsom Street Events™, the producers of San Francisco's no.# 1 public event / street fair: the Folsom Street Fair™, as well as Up Your Alley® & Magnitude®. Because of Curtis's professional recommendation and my sterling interview skills, I was immediately hired for the position and began working there on February 3, 2006.
My career at Folsom Street Events lasted only a year, because I was letting my addiction and my deteriorating health seriously affect my job performance. On January 31, 2007, my employment there was terminated, but only after I had single-handedly grossed record earnings for FY2006, independently achieving a 115% rental sell out of the FSE Exhibitors Division, acheived superior standards for in-house desktop design of vital publications (e.g., Sponsorship Packet, Invoices, etc.) and independently produced a pivotal celebratory event with over 135 attendees: the 2006 Beneficiary Awards Reception, implementing striking innovations, including with regards to venue coordination, catering, invitations, entertainment and awards.
After working for Folsom Street Events for a year, I again fell deep into a cataclysmic depression which eventually lead to my deteriorating health. Just after my birthday, on September 18, 2007, I experienced once again what seemed to be an insignificant common cold, so I didn't go to the doctor's office with concerns that I might have a problem. The illness lasted 2 weeks, until one night while I was watching Robin Williams on Late Night with Conan O'Brian, I feel asleep and didn't wake up for what my doctors now estimate was between 10 to 12 days. I had PCP Pneumonia, was deathly ill and fell asleep unconscious to the world until I was discovered by the San Francisco Fire Department on October 7, 2007, when they came and busted down my door.
My Larkin Street Youth Services Residential Case Manager, Liz Longfellow reported me to the Fire Department missing or dead, as she had not heard from me in three weeks, and I was not answering my phone. The Fire Department discovered me in my bed, face down in a pool of my own blood and urine, my face blacked by a severe, necrotizing bacterial infection and my teeth falling out. The rushed me to the hospital where I stayed for four weeks in a coma. During the coma, the doctors at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital tried to defeat the pneumonia and control the bacterial infection but were unsuccessful. They then decided to transfer me to USCF Medical Center for an emergency debridement surgery, to remove the necrotic, infected skin and bone of my face.
The debridement was successful at eliminating the infection, and two weeks later, I woke up from a coma to discover a giant hole in my face. My mouth and nose had been amputated, and thus began the tedious, heart-wrenching, horrifying and lonely period of waiting for multiple maxillofacial reconstructions. On January 30, 2008, I was transferred from long-term, acute medical residency at Laguna Honda Hospital & Rehabilitation Center to San Francisco General Hospital for the first and most significant of my nine-to-ten facial reconstruction surgeries. A team of plastic surgeons, headed by UCSF Professor of Surgery, Dr. David M. Young, set out to begin reconstructing my upper mouth, by removing a large 12"x5" slab of flesh from my lower left leg and a piece of bone from my fibula and grafting it onto my face. This surgery kept me in intensive care for two weeks. The pain was severe and intense; I could not move out of my bed, sit up, turn around or lay on my side. There was a pouch connected to my chin and my leg by a plastic tube to collect blood and drainage. I was connected to a live-feed morphine drip that I could activate when ever I needed pain relief. I used it as if it were candy. Then I was returned to Laguna Honda Hospital, where I continued to recieve morphine injections for one month and remained bound to a wheel chair for three months.
On April 18, 2008, just five days before my second operation, I was released from Laguna Honda Hospital to return home to my studio apartment, where I would be receiving in-home nursing care three times a week, through until the end of my acute recovery. The second surgery was a mere "revision of the flap" and was not cause for much pain or suffering. The waiting period until my third operation: a "first-stage nasal reconstruction with forehead flap to nose and possible cartilage from either ear or chest," was the worst. The surgery was postponed three times due to unforeseen circumstances (i.e., a life-threathening emergency with another patient and a death in the family of my new plastic surgeon), and during that time period, out of sheer reluctance and bored, I turned once again to crystal meth to quell my worry and anguish.
On September 15, 2008, I finally had my third reconstruction, which was a great success (according to the doctors), albiet leaving me with a severely disfigured visage: a sausage-like flap of skin hanging from my forehead down the length of my nose and a noticeable scar and severe open wound on my forehead. My fourth reconstruction: a "second-stage nasal reconstruction with cartilage from either ear to form left nostril," would have been scheduled for October 23, 2008, were it not postponed after I told my surgeons that I was a crystal meth addict, and they gave me a urine test. The demands of my doctors, concerned that the cartilage graft would not take if my immune system were further compromised by drug abuse, were that I remain sober for one month before my surgery could be rescheduled. I have made it through one month and 27 days of sobriety. By the time of my next surgery, now scheduled for December 22, 2008, I will have been clean and sober for two months and ten days. That's quite an accomplishment, seeing as how all the monotony and terror of waiting is extremely trying on the psyche and is quite a trigger to use.
Since I awoke from a coma in November 2007, just before Thanksgiving, life has been marred by significant, earth-quaking tragedy for me. I am frightened by what I see in the mirror every day, and according to my doctors, who say I "will never look normal again. People will stare, but you will psychologically adjust," my face will always be a little horrifying to look at. I rarely go out in public, and when I do, I always were a surgical mask to cover up my unsightly visage and a scarf to cover up my tracheotomy tube, so innocent but cruel, curious but insensitive bystanders won't stare and ask questions, but; nonetheless, they do stare and make comments, and I just shrug it off, return home and cry myself to sleep in the dark, with my shades drawn and the lights off, so even I can't see my horrifying face.
I have however been blessed to be involved in a portrait arts project with a professional artist I met while she was in residence as the Visiting Artist and facilitating a print-making workshop, "Drawn Together," at Laguna Honda Hospital. By participating in the "Drawn Together" workshops at LHH, I was able to create some beautiful, original floral prints from rubber block stamps that I fabricated into professional style, hand-made stationery.
Helena Keeffe has lead me through a creative process of exploration and discovery in which I have been able to grapple with the demons of my disease and disfigurement, intimately confronting the contours of my deformed, injured face. The portrait project has been a healing process, allowing me to come to terms with my tragic experiences and to learn to appreciate better the beauty I have within me. The designs we collaborated on (i.e., photographic portraits & sketches), along with an audio recording of my oral history, will be exhibited in a window kiosque at the enterance of the Plug In ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) in Winnipeg, Canada throughout December 2008 & January 2009. I am looking forward to how the project might further develop past this exhibition and into the future. I know that the entire process has been integral to my recovery, and I would not want to lose the opportunity to continue working with Ms. Keeffe.
Every day, I am faced with the forbearance and frightfulness of facing disfigurement, and I am challenged to calmly overcome the calamity of damnèd chemical dependency. Life is a harrowing struggle of sanity versus sanctity versus solemnity & single-mindedness. Life is frightening and foreboding. I am fearful of another mighty fall from grace: the lack of fortitude or my succumbing to fragility and feebleness. But, I am, above all things else, a survivor! My dysthymic, bipolar, alcoholic estranged mother says she is proud of me, no matter what I may have lived through. She says, "I do not judge you. I love you too much to judge." Perhaps it is that type of love that I am longing for; love that could be rewarding, healing, happy love: the foundation of a new and long-lasting relationship based on complete empathy and understanding and discretion and censure, again with a mother who once for so long forsook me. With or without that kind of love, I will survive beyond the deformity and illness, to discover once again that which is beautiful inside me: my potential for good, as a "Gift from God."
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