I found out I had HIV in Lima, right in the middle of the pandemic. I had been sick for weeks, with fever, drastic weight loss, and a rash that doctors insisted was COVID or scabies. Something inside me already knew it wasn’t. When I finally got tested at ASF Peru and the result came back positive, the man delivering the news didn’t even make eye contact with me. He just said:
“It’s COVID season. There’s probably no treatment. And since you’re an immigrant… good luck.”
That was my counselling session.
That was my “welcome” into HIV.
I left that clinic feeling like the world had ended, like my body had suddenly become a countdown. The emergency room later denied me medication because I had no Social Security. By then, my CD4 count was 13, and my viral load was five million copies. My skin felt like fire. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t think. I truly believed I was going to die alone in a foreign country.
I insisted for weeks to be treated, and when they finally answered, the Ministry of Health gave me just efavirenz, the most toxic thing they could have put in my body. It poisoned me slowly and violently. Night terrors. Tremors. Hallucinations. Sweating through entire nights. Allergic reactions that left my skin burning. The doctors then changed to another medication that still had efavirenz, so I kept feeling terrible. When I asked for a better regimen, they refused to provide one.
“You’re a migrant. No social security. No change.”
So I stayed on efavirenz until my body began collapsing. That’s when I realised staying in Peru was not a matter of survival, but instead sentencing myself”.
I left.
First Italy.
Then Madrid.
Chasing safety.
Chasing treatment.
Chasing the right to stay alive.
Madrid didn’t save me immediately. I had an infection that was mistreated, so I went to the emergency room, and they rushed me into surgery because no one knew what was happening. Later I developed rhabdomyolysis a condition usually seen in elite athletes, not in people trying to survive toxic medication. Even here, I became “a rare case,” another medical question mark.
Today I’m treated by a whole team: infectious diseases, surgery, dermatology, and rare diseases. My body still carries Peru inside it.
But the most complex wounds were not physical. They came from stigma.
The moment doctors saw “HIV” in my file, everything shifted: their tone, their distance, their discomfort. In a shared house, people refused to let me use plates, cups, or anything that might come into contact with their skin. I remember the shame of it being treated as contamination, not a person.
That humiliation led me to Apoyo Positivo and, through them, to a safe home, a community, a place where I wasn’t a diagnosis but a human being.
Spain gave me something Peru never could:
The right to marry the man I love.
And somewhere in Madrid, something in me finally began to change. HIV didn’t disappear it transformed. It opened doors I didn’t know existed. It pushed me into activism, into knowledge, into owning the narrative that once destroyed me.
I trained as a peer-support worker and as a sexual-health agent. I learned to do rapid tests and PCRs for HIV, syphilis, hepatitis, everything. I discovered I loved infectious diseases. I presented a major Hepatitis C project with the World Hepatitis Alliance. I now speak in universities about HIV, stigma, migration, and everything I survived.
In 2025, I was part of a massive campaign across the Madrid metro system.
Imagine that:
me
the same person who once couldn’t get a doctor to look at me
now staring back at thousands of people every day.
And just last month, I spoke at a massive event about living with HIV. Standing on that stage, I realised something: surviving is not just staying alive. Surviving is reclaiming your voice.
If I could speak to the José who received that diagnosis in Lima, shaking and alone, I would tell him this:
You won’t die.
You will find safety.
You will find love.
You will fight.
You will help others.
You will learn to speak without fear.
And you will be happy.
And today, I am.
Sometimes I even thank HIV not for the suffering, but for the transformation. For showing me who I am. For connecting me with people and communities I would have never met otherwise. For giving me a voice I didn’t know I had.
My story didn’t end in Lima.
It began there.
Because HIV didn’t destroy me.
It remade me.
It strengthened me.
It made me louder, braver, and more human than I ever was before.