Since first publishing on April 16, 1891 the Chilliwack Progress has been the newspaper of record in Chilliwack.
One hundred and 28 years later the Progress remains the longest continuously published newspaper in British Columbia. With the addition of a thriving digital operation anchored by theprogress.com, the Progress delivers more news to more people than ever before.
‘From the Progress Archives’ is a journey into the past, to see what was making news decades ago.
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Headline: Bringing AIDS home
Date: January 31, 1996
Reporter: Robert Freeman
She isn’t gay, doesn’t use needles, and doesn’t sleep around. But five years ago 24-year-old Jane Smith (not her real name) tested positive for the HIV virus that causes AIDS.
“I do not to this day know whether I got HIV through unprotected sex or a teenage tattooing party and we didn’t sterilize everything.”
She means the needles which, like the hypodermics shared by drug users, can carry the deadly HIV virus in the tiniest bit of blood.
But even at 19 Smith admits she knew nothing about the disease or how it can be transmitted through blood and body fluids.
Heterosexuals, she thought, were immune to the virus. In fact 55 people in B.C. contracted the virus through heterosexual sex between 1988-95, according to the latest figures from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.
As late as 1991, Smith says she still thought AIDS was strictly “a gay disease” until a close friend was told she needed to be tested for the HIV virus because she might have been infected as the result of a sexual attack.
Smith hadn’t been “sleeping around,” but she was worried now because she had unprotected sex in the past with “a few” men.
She had also just started a serious relationship with the man she’d eventually marry, and did not want to put him at risk. They had not been sexually intimate at that point.
So she had the HIV test done.
When the test came back positive, Smith says she couldn’t believe the results. She wasn’t sick, didn’t look anything like the pictures of AIDS victims she had seen.
She decided to repeat the test to make sure the results were correct. They were.
After getting the second positive diagnosis, Smith recalls sitting alone in her car in a dark and empty parking lot crying for hours.
She thought about suicide.
Fearing she would be shunned by her friends and family, initially she told only a girlfriend she was living with at the time in a small town near Chilliwack.
A week later she came home to find a ‘Dear John’ note from her friend who had packed up and left the apartment saying “I’m putting myself at risk.”
Smith delayed telling her parents until one night news that basketball star Magic Johnson had AIDS through unprotected heterosexual sex came on the television.
Smith says she broke down in tears and told her parents everything.
“They didn’t shun me,” she says, even though they didn’t know much about HIV and AIDS either. “They said they would be there for me … that we would learn about this virus together.”
As for telling her boyfriend, Smith says she was torn between simply letting go of him, or pushing him away for his own good.
She could not have his children for fear of spreading the virus, and couldn’t ask him to stay to watch the disease take its course.
He wanted to stay with her.
Ironically, after coming to terms with her shortened life expectancy the positive test result has led to a more positive outlook in Smith to make the best of the rest of her life.
She says she has “new dreams, new goals” and one of those is working as a volunteer at the Chilliwack HIV/AIDS Prevention Centre helping others with the disease and educating others how to prevent it.
Anyone can get AIDS today who comes in contact with contaminated blood or body fluids like semen, no matter what their sex orientation, profession or chosen lifestyle.
“It isn’t any one person’s problem, it’s everybody’s problem,” Smith says.
