 What's going on everyone? Rafe DeRozzi here. Thank you so much for tuning in. Today, I will be talking about what my symptoms were when I had HIV AIDS. Now as I've said in the past, I don't know exactly when I contracted HIV. All I know is that I was diagnosed on my birthday May 8th of 2012, which is six years ago this year. So what I can tell you is that the I would say about a year to two years prior, I slowly started developing more and more symptoms and those symptoms started becoming more severe. I would say the first symptom that I really started experiencing and noticed was a general sense of lethargy. I just noticed that my energy overall throughout the day was declining. I didn't really feel like myself. It was harder and harder for me to get out of bed. I had a hard time getting through work. I was serving at a restaurant and I just found myself having to drink more coffee or Red Bull or lots of green teas throughout the day and it just kept, I kept needing more and it was, it wasn't the same as having like a caffeine tolerance. I've had that before and I just noticed that over time like nothing was really working and I just kind of felt a little more dull. My energy, my zest for life was kind of dimming and I felt a little bit more like a zombie in it and I wasn't quite sure what that was. I was going to the, to the gym and I started working out because I thought maybe if I'm exercising just trying to be more fit overall that that'll help my energy levels. So I started doing basic exercises at the gym. I had no idea how to do, how to bench press. I had no idea how to squat. I had no idea how to deadlift. So to say that I was you know really intensely, actively working out is probably like missing the mark a little bit because I was definitely a beginner at that point. I was only using machines. Maybe some light dumbbells for like curls or something like that and then I would do a little bit on the elliptical but nothing really that crazy. So, but I did notice however that even going to the gym and trying to pack on muscle and taking protein that I was actually losing, losing, I felt like I was losing muscle mass. I didn't feel like I was really gaining anything. Which is kind of weird to me. I also was losing weight, but I attributed that to going to the gym and working out and trying to eat somewhat healthy here and there wasn't, I mean it wasn't that great, but I was making some attempt. But looking back I would say that I can probably attribute some muscle loss and some body mass loss specifically to the fact that I had HIV, AIDS and didn't know it and that's why I wasn't able to gain. Also, the next symptom that I noticed was vertigo. This isn't something that I really have experienced that much in my life. Occasionally here and there if you know if I hadn't been eating, maybe I was low on blood sugar or tired or something like that, but it is usually random and few and far in between. But I was pretty regularly, I would say maybe three, four times a week. I would, whether I was sitting, standing, moving around, it didn't really matter. I would suddenly get hit with a wave of vertigo. Everything would start spinning and I'd lose my balance, dizzy, and that would last for maybe 10-15 minutes, had no idea why. The next general symptom that I noticed was body aches all over. My joints, my muscles, just every part of my body. I attributed that of course since I was going to the gym to working out, being sore from working out and exercising, but in reality I would be sore in places that I hadn't worked out. But you know when you're, when you have no idea what to expect and HIV is the last thing on your mind, you rationalize things and you kind of just give explanations of what is the most likely possibility and then if things don't get worse, it's just, it is what it is and you move on. So after that I would say probably about a year out from my diagnosis, I started to notice that I was getting itchy, inflamed bumps on my elbows and on my knees. If I put it under hot water, it would exacerbate it and it would get more red and way more itchy. Now with this, when I was a teenager, I had gotten scabies at one point from sleeping in my friend's bed and they got it and ended up going throughout the whole house. But anyway, during that time when I had scabies, I knew that that feeling was in the same places in my body and it was very itchy and I would get red and stuff like that. So I assumed that I was getting some sort of, that since ever since then I just had sensitivity in those areas and that was just like a some kind of skin rash that I was just gonna have to deal with as a result of having gone through that earlier in life and again rationalize it. Oh, this is just, you know, something I've dealt with before and this is just getting older and I got to deal with stupid skin things and people get psoriasis and stuff like that all the time. So this is probably just something that I got to deal with. Now keep in mind at the same time while I'm going through all this, I don't have health insurance. I didn't have access to health insurance, so some of you are probably thinking, well, why don't you just go to the doctor and have a doctor look at this stuff as it's happening and then maybe the doctor would be able to put the pieces together and say maybe there's something bigger going on here, but at the time I didn't have access. I was making very little money. A short time after having the symptom on my elbows and knees, I started to get a different kind of rash, but this time it was along the outsides of my hands, along the outsides of my fingers, just along the outside of my palm as well, and along the same area, but on my feet. It was these red, started out as like a red orange-ish bump and as it progressed it would it would fill with like a clear opaque liquid and so it would be bubbly and I'd have just tons and tons of bubbles all over really gross, really unsightly, for the most part didn't bother me a little bit itchy, a little bit tender, sensitive, but just for the most part unsightly and just just it was not, I mean, it's not something that you want to see on your hands or your feet and I tried at some point popping them with a needle to see if flushing out the fluid would help, didn't help. They would last for maybe a week, a week and a half to two weeks, and then it would just subside, but usually by then I'd get another flare-up and it would just be a cycle like that over, these flare-ups on my hands and my feet. Now at this point, this is when I started to get very suspicious and think something is very wrong here. Some of you, again, despite not having a doctor and not having health insurance, might think well, why isn't this guy considering the possibility that it's HIV? So, a little backstory. Before I got together with my boyfriend at the time, about three to four months before we'd gotten together, I had gone to the doctor and gotten an STD check. I was at UCLA, they had a on-campus doctor that I could go see, and so I just got tested. I kind of had a scare, I had unprotected sex, and I just wanted to go and make sure that I was okay, and that I didn't have to worry about anything, ease my mind, and sure enough, test results came back negative. So, and this is just before entering into a long term, what I thought was a monogamous relationship, and believed I was negative, didn't have any STDs, so I didn't have any reason to believe that I would have HIV. That's why I didn't really cross my mind. That's why I didn't assume that maybe that was a possibility. So at this point, I began to notice weird bumps on my body. Lumps, I should say. I noticed that under here, under my jawline and my chin, there were two big round mounds there, and they felt larger than I thought I remembered, but again with the rationalizing, I'm just like thinking maybe I'm just thinking that they're bigger, but they're not really, and maybe I just never noticed it before. I was getting sick, I would say, once every month to two months, so I assumed that if there were my lymph nodes, then they're probably just been fighting off colds, and that's normal, and it'll, you know, it'll go away eventually, and then I started to notice that I had some soreness in my armpits, and I would feel there, and there was like tender spots, and I thought, I believe that there are lymph nodes there as well. That's interesting. Maybe my body's just having a hard time. Okay, well, it is what it is, and then I noticed too that we're, that I could feel on the base of my neck, on the back, that one on each side. I could feel the lymph nodes, and again, I just thought maybe they've always been there, and maybe I just never noticed it. Just never really paid attention to stuff like that, and now I'm being like hyper aware, so now I'm paranoid, and then the really weird one that really stood out, and I was like, whoa, okay. This is crazy. Behind my ears, there are apparently some lymph nodes right there, because do you remember those like 90s snacks? It's uh, it's called a bugle, and it looks like a cone. Literally, my lymph nodes back here were so swollen that it felt like bugle sticking out. It came out like a cone, and they were huge. I don't know. I didn't know what to think of it. I thought it was bizarre and strange, but I wasn't necessarily feeling sick. I didn't feel horrible. I didn't have to go to the emergency room. There was nothing pressing, so I just kind of let it slide for a while. I mean, of course nowadays, looking back in retrospect, I'm like, what were you thinking? You should have gone to the doctor immediately, but at the time, I just didn't really think much of it. Except it was weird. It was a little concerning, but what am I gonna do? And then the very last symptom that finally drove me to go to a doctor was a sore that I kept getting in the back of my throat, and my tonsils being, I believe it was my tonsils being inflamed. I thought that I had strep throat in the back of my throat. I thought that's what it was, because it was sore, and it wasn't really healing, and I was getting like other symptoms, like flu-like symptoms, and feeling achy, and sick. So it would, I would get it, and it would last for maybe two weeks, and then it would go away. And I think, okay, great. It resolved itself, didn't need antibiotics. Thank God. And then a few weeks later, it would come back again. And I'd be like, damn. Like, here it is again. I gotta go through this all over again. It would last another week or two. And then this time, it wouldn't go away. It was like three weeks, and I'm saying, I still have it. It still hurts, still sore. And so my boyfriend at the time, his dad had access to medicine, and he's like, let me hit him up in another state, and send over a prescription for you to take antibiotics. So I take antibiotics. It works. Boom. Gone. Great. Awesome. I can move on with my life. Nope. Couple weeks later, it comes right back. So I think this happened for maybe three, four times, and then I was like, okay, whoa. It's been two, three months of this. It's not going away. I need to go to a doctor. I need to find out how to go to a doctor, and that's when I started really scouring the internet, googling how do I get into a doctor's office, a hospital, whatever. I found some obscure random program here in LA that would give me really basic health insurance for free. It was so obscure when I went in to go apply for it, the lady looked at me and she was like, how did you even know about this program? And I was like, oh, I found it on the internet, and she's like, okay, totally weird, I guess. It's probably something that people only have access to through caseworkers normally, but I found it in some tiny little site. I don't know if it was through a forum or what, but thank God I did, because I went in and the doctor immediately was like, let's do a swab of your back area throat. Make sure it's not, you know, some sort of STD. I came back a week later. That's when I found out I had HIV. I came back a week after that on my birthday, and that's when I found out I had AIDS. So those were my symptoms when I had HIV AIDS. If you enjoyed or got something out of this video, please like below, subscribe if you haven't already, and if you think someone else might benefit from this, go ahead and share. Also go ahead and check out my previous vlog. It's about my most recent HIV doctor's visit, so you can see what my whole experience is like from showing up to the doctor's office, what we talk about, what we go through, getting blood drawn and all that stuff, and kind of lift the veil on that whole experience. Check it out. It's my most recent vlog. I'll have it here for you. Thank you guys for watching, and stay tuned. I'll see you soon. Cheers.