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Expecting to die

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Andy: Then I just kind of carried on playing music and kind of living day to day. It was difficult because I couldn't really make any plans, any long term plans. But at the same time you can't live every day as if there's no tomorrow, you know, because you end up crashing and burning through life.

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Ben: I used to ask my doctor, I said to him, 'What's my life expectancy? What can you give me?' And he said, "I can't really do that..." I asked him this when I was about eighteen or nineteen. I said to him, "I really just want to get to twenty-one, I want to be twenty-one. After that I don't feel like it matters too much, I just want to get to there.' And the look on his face was like: 'Oh...you know...I can't guarantee any of that for you.'

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Catherine: He said that I wasn't to be intimate with anybody, not to kiss anyone passionately, not to consider having sex. Absolutely not to think about having children, ever. And that I was probably to expect to live eighteen months at best.

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Dave: I went through a stage of planning my own funeral; what I was going to wear, who was going to be there, the whole scenario. I went through it for months. I just wore black most of the time when I was at college. I was just mourning my own life.

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Joseph: When we first found out, there was a great deal of depression. The purpose of life had almost gone out of the window, and all the fighting up to that point to overcome the haemophilia side seemed sort of pretty pointless. And all these ideas where I'd been planning a future - that had suddenly seemed so bright, because I'd got treatment for my haemophilia - I suddenly couldn't see that ever happening. A career seemed a really distant likelihood, and the chance that I was ever going to live to meet a girl that I would settle down with, and have a family with or pursue all those other goals that I'd made for myself in life...they all kind of evaporated, really. It was a very, very depressing time.

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Mark: The switch in those years was fairly extraordinary, and is one I'm still trying to get to grips with. The years at Cambridge and the early years in London, my horizons were expanding in all respects. I had a good future to look forward to. That comes crashing in on you with an HIV diagnosis, and you know that at some point you're going to become very ill and die very quickly and very nastily.

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Martin: And then obviously I'd got to tell my family - how do you do that? When physically, they look at you and - yes I was very thin - but you're just a healthy 17 year old lad, and you've just been told you've got two years to live. And really, the next ten years, they're what I refer to as the limbo years, because I was just basically waiting for something to happen.

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Patrick: They told me I've got this killer disease inside me. For me it just shut down any sort of possibility of a normal life then. I would have gone into normal work like anybody else, and there'd have been no reason for me not to, because Haemophilia isn't really an issue. I saw it as if I could be dead within a fortnight, really. So it was really just one day at a time, just sort of drifting along really. Unfortunately, that's all I've really been doing and I've never really been able to make long long-term plans.

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Paul: My doctor actually said to me that he was really concerned I went fishing, because he said with all the things on my mind, he thought it was a really bad thing for me to do, to sit somewhere solitary, because I'd have too much time to think. I thought, what a...! This is what I mean about him never wearing my boots. Does he not think that I think about HIV and dying when I'm lying in bed at night? When I'm sat in my car at traffic lights? When I'm doing anything? When all the nice things in life are really going well, and then it hits you like a bolt that - oh fuck, I'm going to die of AIDS soon, aren't I?