Six years ago, Clifford Gentry, graduate student in art and design, was getting tested every three months when, in 2001, he got a call from his doctor revealing that he had AIDS.

“Beth Smith,” an Ames resident who wished to remain anonymous, found out seven years ago that she was HIV-positive with a call back to a hospital after a routine checkup with her doctor.

“[It was] devastating. I couldn’t believe it at first when I first heard it,” Smith said. “But I came to terms with it, I would say, a few years ago.”

Gentry said he had a similar experience when he learned he had contracted the disease.

“I found out at 7:30 on a Friday morning over the phone,” Gentry said. “The doctor called me and told me, [which is] illegal. I don’t think he wanted to deal with it.”

Life with HIV/AIDS could never be described as easy, but both Smith and Gentry said that they have striven to lead normal lives.

“It’s something I think about all the time, but I also know people who have that and let the disease rule their lives,” Gentry said.

Smith said even though being diagnosed could have meant the end of her life, she found a new resolve in life and has “started to take better care of” herself and her two young children.

“[I’m] taking this moment to realize that I can take care of myself and my kids,” Smith said. “I can live a healthy life if I take care of myself. Sometimes I get depressed about it, but look at where I’m at now.”

Although he has been living with the disease for bearly seven years, Gentry said he has used the disease as a second chance in life.

“I should have been dead twice but, for some reason, I’m still here,” he said. “I am going back and getting a master’s degree, and I look at things differently now that I have a second chance on life.”

One of the greatest challenges of living with the disease is dealing with the amount of medication one has to take to survive.

“It’s always been around 35 to 40 [pills per day], but I also get chemotherapy every five weeks for the Crohn’s [disease],” Gentry said. “You know, it’s almost like a full-time job.”

He said one of his HIV medications costs $1,200 a month, but he gets help from Medicaid and Medicare. Smith said she also receives support through Medicaid and Medicare.

“It’s an expensive way, but it’s either that or death,” Gentry said. “It’s a larger pill that contains three medications, and the quantities or dosage is the same as it if it were six. They’ve come a long way with the advancements in medicine to make it easier for those infected with HIV. You know it’s easier, it’s once a day. It used to be every four hours; you’d have to wake up in the middle of the night.”

Although Smith said she has to take only three pills a day, she feels the hardest thing to do is remembering exactly when to take them.

“I don’t like to take pills, period,” she said. “When I first started taking the medicine . taking them when I was supposed to made me sick, nauseated. I really didn’t like taking them, but as I got back into the habit of taking them like I’m supposed to, it really doesn’t bother me as it did.”

Both Gentry and Smith said the biggest challenge they face is the social stigma associated with having the disease. Gentry said he may have lost employment because of it, and Smith said many personal relationships have been fractured because of it.

“I was working in a small business in Chicago that was run by two gay men, and they knew that I was gay, and that was fine,” Gentry said. “But all of a sudden the medical bills started going up. It was after 9/11 and the economy was slow, and I lost my job. I can’t say what the original reasons were, but I think that was a part of it.”

Smith said in her own personal life, her disease has caused much more emotional pain than physical pain.

“I find it difficult to get close to people and really share things about myself. When I first found out about it, a lot of people found out without my knowledge,” Smith said. “And they really discriminated against me and made me feel really unwanted, like they didn’t want me around, and they made me feel really bad. So I had bad experience when I first found out.”

There can be a common thread of fear and despair traced throughout experiences of many HIV/AIDS patients, but there also can be an overwhelming sense of hope and redemption as well. Gentry said even though he doesn’t advertise the fact that he has AIDS, he has been “open and honest” and has never tried to hide it.

“I’ve never walked around on the street and came up to some saying, ‘Hello, I’m Clifford Gentry and I have AIDS,'” Gentry said. “But anymore, we’ve become numb. We hear about it all the time. It just rolls off of the back. It’s still here. There’s no cure. There’s nothing we can do about it. It affects so many different people in so many different ways. And that’s why I’m open about it.”

Smith said she feels some people don’t understand that if a person has HIV/AIDS, they are still human.

“They don’t understand that just because you have HIV that you’re not a person, that you don’t have feelings, or that if you touch them that you can get it,” Smith said. “People aren’t really educated about it. And it makes me pretty angry.”

These are but two individual stories in a world with an estimated 33.2 million people living with HIV/AIDS, including 2.5 million people newly infected with HIV in 2007, according to www.avert.org.

Dec. 1 is World AIDS Day, a time of the year when the world can reflect on the epidemic that has been diagnosed since the year 1981.

Raymond Rodriguez, health program coordinator for Thielen Student Health Center, said there are 1.3 million people in the U.S. today with HIV/AIDS, with 1,500 of them living in Iowa. There have been 20 confirmed cases of HIV/AIDS in Story County, he said, and there is a general misconception about how people can get HIV/AIDS.

“What we hear the most is, ‘How does this happen in Iowa?” Rodriguez said. “Some people just think that it’s just something that is a big-city problem. But that’s how it’s happening here.”

Rodriguez stressed that there are only a few ways now a person can become infected with the disease – either by vaginal, oral or anal sex or by needle-sharing – but it’s not always terminal.

“This is not a death sentence anymore. But if you let it define you, that’s a very unhealthy thing to do,” he said.