Increasing Awareness

As I turn the key and push open the locked conference hall door, a young man in his late twenties stumbles around the corner, a look of sleepiness and apathetic boredom on his face. “Are you here for class?” I ask, trying my best to sound eager and energetic. The response I receive from him is a disheartened “unfortunately.” Soon, three more clients join us, all with the same tired and disinterested faces. Nervous, but hopeful, I stand up and welcome them into the room. “Okay,” I slowly announce “let’s talk about HIV.”

The class gets off to a better start than I imagined. As I switch through the slides discussing the means of possible and impossible transmission of HIV, I hear my clients inhale with surprise. They raise their hands and ask questions of why HIV can be transmitted through blood, but yet cannot be transmitted through mucus. Their eyes open wide when I tell them that the virus can’t be transmitted through mosquitos. They look at me with a perfect mix of horror and shock when I tell them that it can be transmitted through breastfeeding, even if it wasn’t transmitted during pregnancy. They are so blown away by these HIV facts that they never learned about, that I forget how nervous I was to teach these four adults, all older than myself, in the first place. My anxieties of them thinking that I was condescending and rude go down the drain. They are learning something new and interesting, and they are actually enjoying it. However, as excited as I am at their unexpected reaction, I am also concerned. These are facts that I’ve known about since I took my first reproductive health class in the 8th grade; yet it quickly becomes apparent to me that many of these clients may not have ever learned about them. What startles me the most, however, is when we get to the slides discussing HIV in Florida, specifically, in Duval County.

Studies done by the Center of Disease Control₁ show that out of fifty states, Florida is ranked number one for newly diagnosed cases of HIV, what’s more surprising, Jacksonville is ranked the third highest city in the nation, behind only Miami and Baton Rouge, for newly diagnosed cases. Reading these statistics out loud in my class, I found that I was surprising, and scaring, myself, as well as the clients. I have just recently moved to Duval County and I was unaware of the shockingly high rate of HIV in Jacksonville. I looked at my four clients sitting across from me, and noticed that they too, did not know this. None of them asked questions, as these statistics left us all utterly speechless. Some clients closed their eyes and shook their heads back and forth in a slow, revolted manner. Others simply stared with their mouths open, unaware of what could possibly be said. As I went over the rest of the slides covering prevention, the room was much quieter than when we had started the presentation. When the class was finished, I expected the clients to excitedly get up and quickly leave. Instead, they all remained seated, and thanked me for providing them with information that could really, truly, save their lives.

Since this first class, I’ve taught many more, and my clients’ reactions are almost always the same as that first group. Every time class is finished, they all genuinely thank me for the informative, and alarming, information; I feel that I’ve made a small difference in each of their lives. This class may be mandatory for some of the clients I serve, yet I can tell by the end that their attitudes have done a 180. As they leave the clinic and go off into the city of Jacksonville, the city they call home, I can only hope that the hour and a half we spent together discussing HIV will stay with them, and they will remember to make the right choices to live a long, healthy life.

1. Florida-2015 State Health Profile. (2015). Retrieved January 8, 2016, from http://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/stateprofiles/pdf/florida_profile.pdf

This blog post was written by NHC Florida member Kelcey Lamphere.

Kelcey serves at River Region Human Services as a Patient Navigator