Imagine the shock of this, after I had come of age with a two-year life expectancy.  Every few months my expected time on this earth was rounded up a few more months, but the prognosis was always bleak at best.  This went on for nearly a decade, almost all of my 20's.  And there was no doubt that my health was declining.  Recently, I saw a man on a talk show, a leader in the HIV/AIDS community, who described a similar experience, and received a round of applause when he stated his doctors, “Got it wrong.”   This bothered me, and I have been struggling with the complexity of what his statement, and the audience’s reaction, really meant.  What I have decided is that his statement was inaccurate.  If effective treatment had not been discovered in mid-90s, those doctors would have been right.  To my mind, the man on the talk show and I were simply lucky, and I don’t like being credited for luck.  Perhaps we are both fighters, but we can’t know that’s what saved us, because that spirit did not save many other fighters that I knew.   To me it seemed that he, like so many others, is now taking his survival for granted.