Gareth Thomas - Stronger

Gareth Thomas was born in 1974. He played rugby union for Bridgend, Celtic Warriors, Toulouse and Cardiff Blues, winning 100 international caps for Wales and captaining the British and Irish Lions. In 2010 he switched to rugby league, playing for the Crusaders RL, and for Wales. He retired from rugby in October 2011. Gareth announced publicly in 2009 that he is gay, and was voted the most influential gay person by Stonewall that year. In 2019, Gareth spoke openly about living with HIV and has gone on to partner with the Terrance Higgins Trust in order to raise awareness around HIV.

Its a standard sexual health check. I enter the clinic, do a finger prick test where they take a small amount of blood and sit in my car while I wait for the results. I have gone through this routine several times before. Nothing to see here. Just a normal occurrence. Twenty minutes later my phone rings. Time to go back in. No problem. Barely worth thinking about. Like drinking a cup of tea, having a slice of toast.

The medics expression is exactly the same. She is not downcast, nor does she seem nervous. It appears just an everyday moment. I am already thinking about the rest of the day. In fact, in my head, I am halfway home.

And then she says it.

Your test has shown you are HIV positive.

With a shocking, vivid clarity, I feel my world has completely ended. I am convinced, I do not question, that HIV is a death sentence. And now it is my death sentence. I am a dead man walking. I slump into the nearest chair and sob uncontrollably. Emotions confusion, fear, revulsion, disbelief fly around my skull before gathering one by one and solidifying into a single block of grief. I cry because I am sad, I cry because I have HIV and I cry because I am going to die. I think of my family and my friends; my loved ones whose lives I will once again plunge into chaos and despair. I am being engulfed by a giant wave and they are a long way away, watching me from the beach, helpless as I flounder. Just at the point when finally I am getting my life back on track I have ruined everything in the most awful of ways. I say the words in my head: You are crying for somebody who is already dead.

I look up at the doctor. How long have I got left to live? It strikes me in that moment as a question you only ever hear on medical dramas. Except this is real life. The end credits are my own.

It is then that she realises my knowledge of the virus is as flimsy as the tissue on which I am wiping my eyes. She begins to console me, telling me not to worry, while at the same time ringing Cardiff Royal Infirmary, which, she tells me, has a specialist team equipped for just this kind of scenario. They will explain exactly what the diagnosis means.

Dont wait, she tells me, go now.

I can see shes right. Walking out of there with nowhere to go but the darkest recesses of my mind is a terrible idea although thoughts of suicide, which have plagued me in the past, are, at this stage at least, absent. I dont feel the need to kill myself. I have the HIV to do it for me.

The doctor tells the infirmary team to expect me in about forty minutes. It is the most brutal drive of my life. I am a condemned man. This, as far as Im concerned, is AIDS. There might as well be someone in the passenger seat holding a gun to my head. I have no doubt they are going to pull the trigger. There are only two things I am going to find out when I get there. How much longer I have to live and how awful will be my demise. I drive on autopilot as the same two questions sting the back of my eyes: How long? How bad? And then a third question enters my head. How am I going to tell my mum and dad I am going to die?

Dazed, punch-drunk, I park up and head for the unit. I am welcomed by expert medics who sit me down and give me the truth. You have nothing to worry about, they tell me. All things being equal, your life expectancy wont be compromised. You are going to be OK.

Great! Except none of it goes in, not a word.

All I hear is white noise, as if someone has turned up the volume on an untuned radio to full. I am genuinely just not of this world. I have heard HIV positive, decided I am dead, and that is the end of it. I dont hear what the doctors say and I dont want to hear. What does it matter? Death is just around the corner. For a few seconds I am transported back to my twelve-year-old self, sitting in front of the TV, the grey granite tombstone with AIDS carved into it in massive white letters with its equally blaring message underneath: DONT DIE OF IGNORANCE. When I was growing up in the 1980s, the equation was very simple and written starkly in huge letters HIV equals AIDS; plague equals death. Its what I believe and nobody is going to tell me any different. Any soothing, comforting words I do pick up are dismissed by a single thought: Well, you would say that, wouldnt you? Of course youre going to tell me Im OK. Thats what everybody says when someone is terminally ill Dont worry. Youll be fine. Well get through this.

Unfortunately my brain isnt quite so adept at blocking out the physical element of the appointment. My last scrap of dignity vanishes as I lie on a hospital bed and endure a number of highly invasive procedures testing for any other sexually transmitted diseases. I curl up into a foetal position and weep as various swabs are applied to my body.

How much worse can this get? I think. Ive just been told I have HIV, that Im going to die, and now Im being exposed in the most humiliating of ways.

When the ordeal finishes, I numbly clean myself up, slump into the car and drive home.

I am living at my mum and dads. I take a deep breath, open the front door, and walk in.

All right, Gareth? shouts my mum.

Yes, Mum, everythings fine.

How can I bring this weight of hurt into their lives? I cant put them through that pain. Nothing can ever be more important than pretending everything is OK.

I head upstairs to my old bedroom. Wherever I am in life all roads seem to lead back here. I start Googling HIV, trying to find out more about it but I am blind to any real information. All I want to see is negativity, awful stories of the virus and its effects. I dont want to understand, I just want to confirm the stereotypes and prejudices in my head, reasons that prove I am right rather than reasons that prove I am wrong. I am definitely dying and want to know how it is going to happen.

Countries where you can go to die, I type. I need to find out if there is anywhere I can go to slip away quietly. That way I can just tell my mum and dad I am moving away for a while and go through the process in private without them knowing. I cant bear the thought of them ever knowing the truth, that they will be burdened with witnessing their sons death.

While I dont want to die, its not something Im afraid of. I truly believe there have been times already when Ive been dead. I have been so close to taking my own life that I feel like I actually did it. I have coped with my own death and accepted it, so the act of dying holds no fear for me. It is what I will leave behind. How Mum and Dad will become not the parents of Gareth Thomas, the rugby player, but the parents of that guy who ran away and died of AIDS because I know wherever I die the truth, or a version of it, will inevitably come out.