19 and wild!

A 19-year-old teenager was referred to me from one of the peripheral clinic last week. She was of mixed-parentage. She walked into my clinic accompanied by a man whom she claimed to be her ‘god-father’.

She had mistrust in her eyes even as I probed her for her history.

She was referred because she was detected to be HIV+ on a routine pre-institute admission health check.

She answered all my questions in a tentative and non-committal fashion.

No, she don’t do drugs.

No, she doesn’t drink.

Yes, she had a couple of sex partners but she didn’t elaborate.

Yes, she had blood transfusions before a couple of years ago when she had intestinal bleeding from taking paraquat to kill herself.

No, she doesn’t work. She sits around all day doing nothing.

Yes, she feels weak. She can’t sleep.

And that was it. She offered no additional information.

I tried to explain to her as best I could what HIV is and how it will affect her life. I found her to have very little insight and despite my explanations, she appeared to be not too distressed.

She had only one question:

“Can I get married?”

Later I asked her to leave my room so that I could have a private conversation with her ‘god-father’. The man who came with her was actually from her church. The church elders were concerned with her wild behaviour and wanted to send her to a correctional centre and because of the health check requirement prior to admission there, they discovered her HIV status by accident.

That was in April 2008!

8 months ago!

Apparently the doctors in the health clinic ‘lost’ her files and only managed to find it now and referred her to me.

In that 8 months, despite knowing her HIV status, she continued to have unprotected sex with young men, many of them,  almost nightly! According to her god-father, she is a sex-addict and needs to have sex regularly. She grew up watching porn with her mother in the living room at night. In fact, a video of her having sex is being passed from phone to phone in her home town and has found its way into the internet. She was dismissed from a job in a local hotel because she was caught having sex with the employees there!

Oh God! This is a disaster in the making. It’s an ID physician’s nightmare.

She is the modern ‘Typhoid Mary’!

The boys who had sex with her might contract HIV; they will be asymptomatic for years and in that time, they will have sex with others, or get married and pass it to their wives who will pass it to their children!

‘Houston, we have a BIG PROBLEM!’

In the end, I did not know how to deal with this problem.  Can we incarcerate such people? Are we allowed to?

I asked her god-father to approach the church elders to consider sending her to a half-way house and hopefully she can get some rehabilitation there.

She is 19, young, pretty, wild, ARMED and DANGEROUS!

Tues, 091208 @ 0700