Svetlana
34 years old
*(city is not mentioned at the request of character)
When she was 17 Sveta got married and had a daughter. Her husband took injection drugs and she had to take them too to be closer to him.
Sveta got HIV from one of the drug-addicted.
Soon she got into a hospital in a critical condition. She got tuberculosis and pneumonia, both lungs almost did not work.
Some years Sveta spent in hospitals fighting against addiction and AIDS.
“One day I woke up, looked through the window and made a decision. I saw green trees, blue sky and understood that I hadn’t been paying attention to this for so long. I’d love to live, I really wanted to live”.
Now Sveta is married again and works as a general director of a beauty studio.
She faced the stigma in hospitals: HIV-positives were put into separate rooms, they were not allowed to eat in a common dining room, they were served in the last turn. When Sveta needed to have her lung operated, hospital rejected to operate her because they did not have “protection suits”.