Somewhere Under the Rainbow…

By Liza Zvezda

One womans story of contracting HIV and how it is not the end of the world

This book is my story. The opinions expressed are that of my own and hold weight only in my world. My world of HIV and all that it takes to overcome something that was once considered a fatal disease.
A disease that still carries stigma and fear to the public. A walking death sentence that people dont understand doesnt have to be that way.
My hope is to open the eyes, ears and hearts of all those who read it. To educate the uneducated over a disease that is still as prominent today as the day it started to invade our lives , taking those we loved.
I want to share my deepest feelings, my darkest moments, my dreams and my live story in hopes to make a difference on how people view this disease.
To gain insight to what it takes to walk in the shoes of someone who has a terminal illness that there is still no cure for. To let it be known my name is Liza I am Hiv+ and thats ok..

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481709767

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© 2013 by Liza Zvezda . All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 04/04/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-0975-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-0977-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-0976-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013901164

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Author’s Notes

Prologue

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Part 2

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Part 3

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Part 4

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Epilogue

RECOMMENDED WEBSITES

Author’s Notes

I want to thank my family for all their support in writing this book.

I want to thank all those people who are still working hard on finding a cure for this disease. All those who have done an AIDS walk or any other fund raiser to raise awareness in their communities.

December first is World AIDS Day. Please remember not only the ones we have lost but the ones who have been saved. Don’t let it be a day of sadness. Let it be a day of joy as we move into the next phase of this disease where it is no longer a terminal disease but a manageable illness.

God Bless those who have suffered and those who have survived.

Author will donate 10% of the sale profits to AIDS research. Together we can find a cure.

Prologue

As I stared at the ceiling of my six-by-eight-foot cell, I thought to myself, how does someone like me end up here?

The girl who flunked gym because I wouldn’t shower in front of other girls, the person who wouldn’t use public restrooms for fear someone would hear me peeing—me, who was a private person and never talked about personal hygiene with anyone, not even my own mother.

I was now about to enter a place where no privacy existed. For the next sixty days I would spend every waking moment with someone watching over me. Every sleeping moment I would have to keep one eye open to see who would get out of their bunk and wander into the open area, lurking around in the dark after lockdown.

I shut my eyes and began to travel back to how it all began. My parents divorced when I was twelve, and so I am a product of a broken family. Two years after my parents’ divorce, my father had an accident playing football in our backyard; my two brothers tackled him and broke his neck. He spent the next six months in a Seattle hospital paralyzed and hooked to machines just to be kept alive. After his death I lived with several different family members trying to find a place I belonged.

After my parents’ divorce, I had a real hard time getting along with my mother; after my father’s death it was worse. I didn’t want to live with her, and I no longer had him to go to when I wanted to. I was bounced from four different relatives until eventually I went to live with a stepsister who had become a part of my life when my mother started dating her father.

I dig deep here because I truly believe we are not responsible for what we do as children or what happens to us while in other people’s care. It is the people responsible for us that should guide us in the direction of proper adulthood. Those who influence us, those who shape the very person we become.

I really don’t believe my experiences growing up caused me to be here, nor do I think that’s why I made bad choices as an adult. Do I think my life could have been different? Most definitely, there are things that happened to me along the way that influenced the places I went, the people I met, and the direction my life took, but ultimately I take responsibility for me being here. I believe that becoming an adult involves leaving your childhood behind and growing away from all that was before you reached adulthood. Some people don’t do this transition well; some can’t let go of the past and move forward. They go through life blaming their childhood for a dysfunctional adulthood. I encourage anyone who has not been able to grow into their adulthood because of childhood trauma to get help. As a child we cannot carry the guilt of others’ bad behaviors or the anger from disappointments into our adulthood. If we do, we will never grow up.

So how far back do I need to go to understand when my life became my own responsibility and went so very wrong?

I was married young, to my high school sweetheart. It wasn’t the best of circumstances; I had become pregnant at seventeen, dropped out of high school, and became a mother. I thought I could do it all, not realizing the person I would commit my life to would have many demons of his own. In the beginning things seemed to work. I was living in an apartment while he still lived at home trying to finish school. We wanted to get married, but his parents would not allow it. We were both under eighteen and in love.

There is something special about young love. Your unknowing leap of faith into the adult world. Your belief that you know everything and can conquer it all by defying the adults in your life who are trying to guide you in the right direction. We thought we knew everything and believed love was all it would take to raise a baby and make it work. We had no clue that the things our parents told us would turn out to be true.

It was hard to see my sweetheart at that time continue to be the carefree student, going to parties, hanging out late at night with his friends, while I stayed home taking care of our baby boy. I felt left out and isolated more times than in the past when I was being bounced from one family member to the next. I then found comfort in my new baby—unconditional love. I had so many dreams and hopes for his life, I never thought I would let him down. I thought I’d always be there for him. I would spend many lonely nights rocking him to sleep. He was a colicky baby; he would cry for no reason, and it was very difficult to understand why I could not help him. His dad would get frustrated not knowing how to handle it and use that for an excuse to leave, to get out for a few minutes. I should have known then I was headed down the wrong path of life, but instead I hoped for a bright future for us all.

We began to plan our wedding. I would turn eighteen that September and he in November. Our wedding took place two days after his eighteenth birthday, his parents never giving in to letting us do it prior to that date, even though by this time we had both dropped out of high school and were living in the apartment together.

Our wedding was a small one in a little church. I was happy and thought life was opening up a new world for me. I would have a husband to love me, a baby to take care of, and finally something that felt permanent in my life.

Two years into our marriage we bought a house. We were both just turning twenty, and I was pregnant for the second time. To all our friends we were the couple who had it figured out and were making it. There were times when being married was hard. I was the one who stayed home, and since I was home, I was often asked to watch other people’s children while they all went out for the night, including my husband.

I knew he was enjoying both worlds, not truly wanting to give up his freedom of youth to raise a family. In the beginning I believed he would outgrow this and want to be a husband and a good father. I tried to understand why he did not enjoy the life of being a parent and staying home on the weekends. We began to fight over his absence, his lack of responsibility, and his drinking. He was still underage and could not purchase alcohol himself so he didn’t have a drinking problem—yet.

On his twenty-first birthday that changed.

We decided to have a birthday party at our house, inviting all our old friends from school and some of his coworkers. Things were going really well until later in the evening when I overheard my husband talking to another guest and realized it was not a friendly conversation. As I looked over, I heard him yelling, This is my house and I will prove it. He slammed his fist into the wall, leaving a huge hole where once there had been none. I was stunned! I could not believe he just damaged his own place.

People started gathering around, trying to calm him down and find out what had just happened. He just kept screaming, This is my house, and at that moment there was no talking to him. He was belligerently drunk and unaware of his actions. The party came to an end, and the mood had turned sour. I was crying over the damage he had done. This was my first home, a place I was proud of and that represented a safe haven for me and my children. But now my husband had shattered that sense with a fist through the wall. I never really realized at the time he had damaged more than the wall that day; he damaged my feelings of security. It began a pattern of drinking and abuse that would last for several years.

It’s funny how you don’t expect human kindness for yourself, but if you have a child you will expect nothing less for them. The next few years that followed would be filled with pain and sorrow, broken dreams, and the reality that teenage love is so far from the adult world that when the two collide there are always casualties. I wanted my marriage to work so badly I accepted the bad behavior that went on.

I could no longer pick my own clothes. I wasn’t allowed to wear red because only whores did, according to my husband. He always had a reason I could not dress in anything that made me feel or look good. I learned to dress very plain and not wear makeup, just to avoid fights. The strange part is I didn’t mind all this; I thought it was his way of showing me he loved me. I thought he loved me so much, he didn’t want anyone to look at me. But in reality, it had nothing to do with love.

The timer on the oven would be set when I left to go to the store. He would look at my list and guess how long it should take me to get there and back, and then set the timer. I would rush madly to the store, race up and down the aisles knowing I was going to forget something. I had two kids in tow while trying to beat the clock. There would be times when I got in line and would look at the clock and know I would not have time to wait my turn, so I would leave the cart with the groceries in it as I hurried out the door to make it home before the timer went off. The yelling for not getting the shopping done on time was less painful than the hitting for taking too long, for I would be accused of going somewhere besides the store.

He was running around, going places that a married man should not be going to. He would leave for a pack of cigarettes and not come back until the next day. Our fights grew worse, and it was destroying our marriage. The verbal and physical fighting did not carry over to the children, so I felt I needed to stay for their well-being. I did not want them to have a broken home and have to be raised by a single parent. I wanted them to have a father in their life since I had known what it was like not to have one and felt it was important. Being young, you do not realize you create more damage staying in an abusive situation than you do if you leave and get help.

But help is not always effective unless the person wants it. Following his twenty-first birthday there were DUIs, a totaled vehicle, a girlfriend who was thirteen that he would leave me for, and two rehab clinics—all contributing to the breaking down of our marriage.

On my son’s sixth birthday, something happened that would give me the strength I needed to leave. I had planned a party for our son but had not gone shopping for his decorations or gifts. Payday was not until the Friday before his birthday. I was waiting, as we were living from paycheck to paycheck. I had started working around that time, and my husband was staying home with the kids. He showed up at my job that Friday saying he needed the car to go look for a job. I let him know I needed to go to the bank after work, and he promised to be back at six that evening to pick me up.

He never did. I ended up walking home from work. He didn’t come home that evening or the next morning. I was so furious that he would do this to our son. I was used to his neglect, but it was our son’s birthday, and he had no gifts. I pulled it off the best I could. I baked a cake and made decorations with the kids, explaining to them this would be more fun than store-bought balloons and banners. We decorated for his party, but when his guests started to arrive, I still had no presents for him. Even though he did not know that his party to me was a failure, it broke what little I had left in me to continue in my marriage.

My husband did not return until the following day, giving one story after another as to why he missed our son’s birthday. I was done. All the bad things that went on in our marriage—both of us making mistakes and not doing the best we could—I could deal with, but when it came to my children, the mother that I was then would not allow harm to come to them. I knew it would be a matter of time before things would start affecting them, since there was constant fighting around them.

By the time I was twenty-three, I had two children and an abusive alcoholic husband who had been in and out of three drug-and-alcohol clinics and diagnosed a manic depressive. He refused to accept his illness, and being told he needed medication only led him to drinking more. Needless to say, my marriage failed. I took my children and moved back to the apartment I lived in as a teenager. I felt bad for leaving. I felt I was failing and didn’t deserve to keep the house. I also knew he would continue to come and go as he pleased, always saying it was his house and he had the right to do so.

I was tired of fighting with him. I was tired of the alcohol-induced fights that escalated out of control constantly. I just wanted to be away from it. I was still very young and naïve about life. Just because you get married and have children, don’t think the answers to life will magically appear, because they don’t. By the time I had left my marriage I had very little self-confidence, low self-esteem, and the burden of failing one more time in my attempt to have a happy family.

But it wasn’t then that I fell apart. I still had not made too many bad choices. I was a good mom, loved my children very much, and still had it together. I was not the one who was going through drug-and-alcohol treatment centers every six months. I may have been unsuccessful in my relationship, but I was managing being a mother to two young children. They were happy when they learned we were leaving, not really understanding what life would become for them. None of us did.

That would bring me to Kenny. My best friend, my worst enemy. The man I would love the most and hate the most. He was my high, my low—he was my everything, and he would eventually leave me with nothing.

Yes, I think that is where my life went terribly wrong, when I met Mr. Wonderful.

Part 1

Path To Destruction

"Examine me, O Lord, and prove me; try my reins and

my heart."—Psalm 26:2

Chapter 1

As we loaded the last bit of my belongings into the back of a friend’s truck, I jumped in the passenger side and thought, I finally did it. I finally found the courage to get out of a bad marriage. I was glad a mutual friend of both of ours was there to help me. We had all gone to school together and never dreamed life could be so complicated.

As we pulled out, Lance looked over and said, Ready? As I nodded, I didn’t realize then I was nowhere near ready to face the world on my own.

Lance had taken me out to celebrate my divorce. I don’t think he realized I had only been to a bar one time in my life prior to that. On my twenty-first birthday I had gone with a neighbor for a celebratory coming-of-age drink. After that one drink I was ready to go home. I was married, had two children, and the bar was not someplace I felt comfortable in. Besides, I didn’t like the taste of alcohol and had never really been a drinker.

I guess that’s why my first big night out as a single woman did not go too well. I knew I could depend on Lance to take care of me. In fact, I believe before we started to drink I said, You are responsible for me tonight. I knew I could trust him. After all, he was the one true friend I did have at that time. He would come by the house to check on me and the kids to see if we needed anything when my husband would leave for days at a time. He had been there when my husband had left me several times and understood how much I went through before I finally left. I knew it was hard for him to be caught in the middle; he was a friend to both of us, and finding balance could not have been easy. How can you not be affected when the marriage of two of your closest friends is falling apart and you feel you don’t want to take sides? I was thankful he had found a way to be comfortable in helping me and not feeling he was betraying his friendship to my ex-husband.

We met up with a couple of his friends and went out for drinks. At some point we all started drinking straight shots of tequila and toasting to my divorce. Then the toast was changed to ménage a trois, which I cheered to very enthusiastically believing it was French for congratulations on your divorce. As the drinks kept coming and I tried to keep up with my fellow drinkers, Lance looked over and asked, Do you know what you’re drinking to? I smiled happily and said yes! not having a clue.

When we left the bar I could barely walk and remember being helped out. When we pulled out of the parking lot, Lance made an illegal right-hand turn and was immediately pulled over. I remember looking into the rearview mirror and seeing the lights flash, which made my head swim and my stomach turn. Before I knew what happened, I had thrown up all over myself, and all I could think of was they would know I had been drinking.

Lance was removed from the vehicle and failed the sobriety test. He was allowed to give me his apartment key and told me to walk back to his place and he would be there later. His apartment was only a couple of blocks from where we were. His friends had also been in the vehicle, so we all set out on foot as Lance was put in the back of the police car.

Sometime in the evening Lance must have told me what the meaning of ménage a trois was because as I started walking with two strange men, I began to panic at what would happen once back at the apartment. I crossed the street to walk on the other side, but as I passed under a streetlight I saw they had too. After all, I had the key. I double-backed around, almost getting lost, but I had ditched the guys who probably thought I was too drunk to find Lance’s apartment. After I let myself in, I locked the doors