From Poz Magazine online…
Alora Gale thought that by the late 2000s, most—if not all—medical providers understood that HIV does not survive long outside the body and cannot reproduce outside a human host. “Even in 2008, a quick Google search would’ve answered this question,” says Gale, 40, a Seattle-area resident who was born with HIV and formerly ran BABES, a longtime peer group for women living with HIV. But that year when she spoke to her longtime ophthalmologist about having LASIK surgery to improve her vision, the ophthalmologist consulted a LASIK-performing colleague who warned that Gale’s HIV “could become airborne and infect everyone in the room,” Gale recalls. On that basis, she was deemed ineligible for surgery.
“That’s the BS my doctor accepted and brought back to me,” she says. Despite being a longtime advocate for people living with HIV, she says she was so “shocked, dismayed and bewildered in that moment” that she just walked out without saying a word. “When things like that happen in a trusted space, it just hits differently, and I wasn’t ready to fight back.”
But that soon changed. Gale called her ophthalmologist and asked to have her records transferred to a different provider. Didn’t she want to try to talk through it first? “Absolutely not,” she says. She felt the claim was so far-fetched that the doctor should have researched it to learn that it wasn’t true.