David Forrester should have been dead 21 years ago.
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That’s if his terminal diagnosis a year earlier was accurate.
Instead, by some miracle, he’s fit and healthy and off all the medications he was prescribed — and ingested like clockwork for 10 years — after learning that he had HIV in 2002.
He had been engaged, but sadly split with his partner after the trauma of a couple of miscarriages took its toll on their relationship.
Not long after, he contracted a sexually transmitted infection.
As standard procedure when an STI is discovered, his blood was screened for others and that’s when the HIV result spoke ominously of his impending fate from the ink on the page of results bearing his name at the top.
“It was devastating. It destroyed my life. It just turned everything upside down,” Mr Forrester said.
“It stopped me in my tracks in a really bad way.
“I was suicidal, I didn’t want to live or die like that, so I was organising heroin (to end my life) and things like that. I thought, ‘I ain’t gonna die like that’.”
Concerned for his welfare, a friend in Brisbane convinced him to move there for support and treatment.
He spent four years in Queensland’s capital and enlisted as a patient at Roma St and Redcliffe medical centres; two places with HIV specialists.
Staff administered his medication to maintain his CD4 (cluster of differentiation 4, cells that help co-ordinate the immune response to fight against HIV, which weakens the immune system by destroying them, by stimulating other immune cells) levels to 400-450.
“I just ended up getting really sick in the end,” Mr Forrester said.
“I met a registered sexual health nurse in Roma St called Michelle Flynn and she changed my life again.
“She was a real blessing. She was on Freddie Mercury’s (frontman of rock band Queen) nursing team when she was a junior nurse, which is amazing, so she used to tell me these stories.”
Michelle took an interest in Mr Forrester as a human being, rather than just a medical subject, and the pair eventually went on to start a HIV charity together.
“We became pretty good friends. Her and her husband had a home in the Glasshouse Mountains, so I used to go out there and visit and sit in the backyard and look at the mountains and talk about HIV, HIV cures and just health in general and charities,” Mr Forrester said.
“She was interested in doing charity stuff as well.
“We set up Straight Talk Australia Incorporated — we were prevention and control of infectious disease, specifically for HIV-positive heterosexual people and their family and friend support because there really wasn’t anything for heterosexual people. Not that we were discriminating, it was just a different culture.
“There’s not a real big audience of heterosexual people with HIV. We didn’t get funding. Queensland Government said they would only fund one per state, which was QPP (Queensland Positive People), and Michelle wanted to go back to London, so we kind of wound it up.”
Mr Forrester said Michelle was a spiritual woman who believed that rather than fight with ailments, people should try to adapt to living with them.
“So talk to your body and tell it, ‘If I die, you die, we all die’, so you can live in harmony, which seemed far-fetched,” Mr Forrester said.
“But I understood the concept because I do believe we create our realities and those kinds of things anyway.”
Ten years after his diagnosis and a truckload of drugs to fight it, he wasn’t getting better.
Instead, he grew sicker than he’d ever been.
He weighed just 45kg and his CD4 count had dropped to hover between 40 and 80.
It was supposed to be at 1600.
“I got so sick, I was yellow with jaundice and I couldn’t eat,” Mr Forrester said.
“They were giving me more medications for nausea, so piling on medication on medication. I was in there all the time. They were taking blood all the time and nothing was really coming out of it that I could see.
“I was just sick, really not in a good way, so I said to the doctors, ‘If this is going nowhere, nothing is working, I’m going, I’m going back to Victoria to take care of some affairs, like my will and trust’.
“So I did. I left; I just walked away from it.”
Miraculously, his condition started to improve.
“As soon as I stopped taking medication, I got better. I wasn’t yellow anymore and I started putting on weight straightaway,” Mr Forrester said.
He admits his controversial story is hard to believe.
And he has a few theories on why he’s still upright more than two decades later.
Perhaps he’ll never know without doubt the real reason.
“We did a lot of study, a lot of research, a lot of seeking cures and there really wasn’t many,” Mr Forrester said.
“I was pretty much on my hands and knees praying to God after I stopped taking the medication. That was it, I was pretty much done.
“I started finding books, I read AIDS Inc.: Scandal of the Century by journalist Jon Rappoport.
“In there he went into a trial in Nigeria called a-Zam and it’s black seed and raw honey, but they made it into a pill form and they gave it to 40 HIV-positive patients — men and women, pregnant women — apparently in two weeks, most of them were clear of symptoms and 12 months later none of them had HIV/AIDS, babies were born without it.”
With not a great deal of hope left at that stage and still under the belief he was dying of the virus, he embarked on his own black seed and Manuka honey journey.
“It’s really amazing stuff, I don’t get colds or flus anymore, I haven’t for years,” he said.
After 12 years of relying on the natural alternative, Mr Forrester said he was no longer affected by the illness he was diagnosed with 22 years ago, and, what’s more, believes he’s no longer carrying the virus.
Though he hasn’t been re-tested to confirm his theory, he questions whether his original diagnosis was accurate to begin with.
“I don’t think I’d like to rely on a test anyway, for all I know the test was false from the start,” he said.
“At the time when you hear your diagnosis, you’re just shocked, but then 10 years later, I started considering it.
“How would I even get HIV? I’m not gay, I’m not a junkie, I was engaged, she hasn’t got HIV, so how would I even get HIV?
“I wasn’t sick. I didn’t have any of the symptoms they said when I was diagnosed: the sweats, the weight loss, anything like that. None the whole time.
“I really don’t know, I question sometimes, ‘Did I even have HIV?’.”
For the safety of others, he’s lived what might’ve been the best years of his life celibate.
He has been disowned by some of his friends and family members.
He’s been hesitant to talk of his journey because he’s been mocked and humiliated about his theories and beliefs.
However, no-one can argue that it’s quite remarkable to see him survive 21 years longer than was predicted by medical professionals.
He is quite literally living proof that he is — well — still living.
∎ If you or someone you know is suffering emotional distress or experiencing a personal crisis, contact Lifeline on 131144, or visit lifeline.org.au
Senior journalist