Medical Choices discussion group--This group is a forum in which to freely discuss any aspects of complicated and evolving personal decisions regarding medicine and treatment.
Dealing with Medication and Illness discussion and support group facilitated by some kind of medical provider.
Depression and emotional life with HIV support group.
Isolation discussion and support group—dealing with isolation due to concealment or revelation of HIV status, isolation due to physical and emotional challenges of HIV, isolation due to lost time, isolation due to nonacceptance or displacement from family, isolation due to not being fully included by or not fitting into a community, isolation due to prejudice and discrimination, isolation due to our own anger and fear.
Anger Management workshop--a harm reduction approach to creative ways of dealing with intense, negative emotion.
Fear Management (same).
Venting group--facillitated complaining. We'll take turns but we won't try to improve anything or help each other. But we won't be mean either.
Contentions group--More formulated complaining (post-venting). What complaining (post-venting) is true and possibly useful? In this group we can give each other feedback on letters we might send.
+ a virtual agency of San Francisco for HIV+ people and their friends of all kinds +
1.
My wiseman/doctor told me to consider focusing on what I want rather than on trying to help. In some way I don’t think he intended, that switched my mode of thinking from: I need this help or that help, and if I need it I am probably not the only one who does--so there is potential justification in complaining about not getting it--to: If I had millions of dollars and unlimited resources, this is what I would want to give to HIV+ people in San Francisco, my closest community, (anonymously), because (--I don’t have any reason to think anyone else would want it, and I have no reason to believe that it could exist) but--this is all that I want:
If I could be a client to this imaginary agency, if I could just be in the house, it would make my life here worth all the other care I now receive. I very much believe that the surroundings a "+Positive House" would allow would result in my unfolding into living the worthy, content, productive life my caregivers wish for me, that I can’t live now.
I would want to give this my house--not as replacement or improvement to existing SF HIV-care for myself or others, and not without gratitude--but as adjunct to what already exists, and as outreach, by inclusion, to some individuals and to some forms of relationships considered not to be in need of help, or not considered at all.
+Positive House is a playfully edgy, lovingly made-up space, but any aspect of it, or even slightly changed approach represented by it would contribute to this real person's holistic health and wellbeing in the world (and in this city) as an HIV+ individual--beyond the ways her present treatment and environment are able to help, and beyond what she is capable of on her own.
This is the whole of what I would want to magically be able to give, give away, and then to receive somehow in reality.
the caretaker
sfpositive@gmail.ccom
My Profile
SF HIV Testing Sites
HIV/AIDS 101
SF HIV Prevention
HIV/AIDS Info Sites
SF + Referral
- +She
- AIDS Emergency Fund
- AIDS/HIV Nightline (nighttime emotional support)
- Black Coalition on AIDS
- El Grupo (Latino/Latina support).html
- Positive Resource Center (work)
- Project Inform (treatment info)
- Project Open Hand (food)
- Saint James Infirmary (for sex workers of all kinds)
- San Francisco AIDS Foundation
- SF AIDS Housing Alliance
- SF General Hospital-Ward 86
- Smoking Cessation for + People
- Speed Project (for men)
- Stop AIDS Project (for men)
- UCSF AIDS Health Project (counseling and mental health)
+ Matchmaking
SF and NO +$ Events
SF + Body/+ Spirit Care
- +Mind/+Body Medicine Studies
- AIDS/HIV Nightline (nighttime emotional support)
- Immune Enhancement Project (accupuncture and bodywork)
- Kirtan
- Names Project (the Quilt)
- PAWS-Pets Are Wonderful Support
- Peet's Coffee andTea (mail order)
- PFLAG (Parents,Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays)
- Positive Pedalers
- SF Free Walking Tours
- SF Insight (meditation)
- SF SPCA Dog-Walking and Cat-Socializing
- Shanti LIFE program
Coveted Inclusive HIV+ Community Coffee House
Outside World
+ House Library Reference
- AIDS Update 2007 (textbook)
+ House Library Periodicals
+ House Movies to See Again
- And the Band Played On
- Angels in America
- Boys on the Side
- Gia
- Philadelphia
- The Hours
+ House Favorite Blogs
Caretaker's Blog
Want to create cafe reading, writing, or topic discussion groups for SF HIV+ people and friends?
"To look life in the face,
...always, to look life in the face. To know it for what it is. To love it for what it is. And, then, to put it away.... Always the years between us.... Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours." -Virginia Woolf in "The Hours"
2 comments:
OK--this is a rhetorical question for the venting group: Can ANYONE OF ANY KIND POSSIBLY believe that #6 of AIDS LifeCycle's Mission Statement needs articulating!!!!!! [#6 says that one of the purposes for the Ride is to "contribute to an increased understanding of the disproportionate impact HIV has had on the GLBT communities in SF and LA"]. Excuse me???!!!! Are you completely unaware of the numbers of HIV+ people in cities with much higher straigh infection ratios who think of themselves as having a gay disease even if they don't think of themselves as gay? The ONLY reason I can come up with for any of you thinking you need to articulate your disproportionately-affected ratio is to explain away the extremely disproportunate Ride participant ratio of LG and B men and women to the diverse proportions of people in this sate affected or infected with HIV. And there are more straight people than there are L's, B's, and T's even in San Francisco if you quit talking ratios and start talking about the actual numbers of individual human beings living with HIV in their bodies--and there is not one single service either of your SF and LA agencies provide for THEIR relationships AT ALL. That is so beyond disproportionate. HOW MUCH MORE "INCREASED UNDERSTANDING" [about that] DO YOU NEED?
This is more a Forbidden Questions group comment (page 15), but a follow-up to the previous comment here: Does anyone have calculations for the ratios between HIV+ MSM's, to heterosexuals, to lesbians and bisexual women, to transgenders in San Francisco, accounting for IV drug use as a confounding variable? The people I've asked have said the DPH records are of ratios of populations divided by reported means of infection (not identification), or are of MSM's to IVDU's to non-specified women.
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