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by bane
839 days ago
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This section seems to speak to your observation (edited for brevity): Doctors told me they could think of only one other comparable breakthrough in recent memory: the arrival of powerful HIV drugs in the 1990s. Like Trikafta, those drugs were not a cure, but they transformed AIDS from a terminal illness into a manageable chronic one. Young men got up from their deathbed, newly strong and hale.
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This was a remarkable turn of events. But it elicited a complicated mix of emotions, not all of them joyful. Some patients who were no longer dying grew depressed, anxious, and even suicidal at the thought of living. This phenomenon became known as “Lazarus syndrome.” Death is an end, after all. Life comes with problems...the writer Andrew Sullivan, who is HIV-positive, described life after the advent of the HIV drugs in his essay “When Plagues End”: When you have spent several years girding yourself for the possibility of death, it is not so easy to gird yourself instead for the possibility of life. What you expect to greet with the euphoria of victory comes instead like the slow withdrawal of an excuse. And you resist it.
The intensity with which you had learned to approach each day turns into a banality, a banality that refuses to understand or even appreciate the experience you have just gone through.
For some HIV patients, their reversal of fortune seemed unreal. “He doesn’t trust what’s happening to him,” one doctor said about a patient who had made a dramatic recovery, yet found himself in psychological distress." |
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