"He wasn't a very active father so everyone thought it was strange when he showed up," Jackson says."He sent my Mum down to the cafeteria to get a drink so he was alone with me."When the coast was clear, Stewart took out a vial of HIV-tainted blood and injected it into his son."He was hoping I would die off so he wouldn't have to pay child support," Jackson says.His mother returned to find him screaming in his father's arms. "My vital signs were all out of whack because it wasn't just HIV blood he had injected me with, it was incompatible with mine."The doctors were baffled. Oblivious to the deadly virus now coursing through his veins, they restored his pulse, temperature and breathing to normal and sent him home expecting him to live full and healthy life.But in the weeks that followed, Jackson's mother saw her lively child's body begin to deteriorate before her eyes.Desperate for a diagnosis, for four years "she carried me to numerous doctors' appointments begging them to find out why I was near death," Jackson says. But none of the tests they ran gave any clue.Even though he was a child, Jackson was aware his situation was frightening. "I remember waking up in the middle of the night screaming, 'Please Mum don't let me die!'" he says.One night, after he had been checked for every disease imaginable, his paediatrician woke up from a nightmare and called the hospital to ask them to test for HIV."When the test came back, I was diagnosed with full-blown Aids and three opportunistic infections." The doctors came to the conclusion there was no hope of his survival."They wanted me to have as normal a life as I could," he says. "So they gave me five months to live and sent me home."The doctors continued to treat Jackson, though, with every drug available.Image copyrightJACKSON FAMILYImage captionBrryan Jackson on his mother's lapHe says his entire childhood was lived "one day at a time". Staying alive was a high-wire act. "One day I would seem fine, the next hour I would be rushed back to the hospital with another infection," he says.He was left hearing-impaired as a side-effect of the medication.But while other children Jackson had met in hospital did not survive, much to the amazement of his doctors, Jackson's health began to improve.Eventually, he was just about healthy enough to go to school, and started attending lessons part-time with a backpack full of medications fed through an intravenous line.
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2019-11-15
2019-11-15
2019-11-15
2019-11-15
2019-11-15
2019-11-15