[Toy Soldier]

It really is amazing how far we've come with HIV in the last decade or so, it was a death sentence for so many years and then for a long time after that, an endless tightrope of illness and balancing medications. These days, viral load can be brought down to almost undetectable levels and (so long as people are sensible and healthy), people can live a full life HIV positive and never develop AIDS. I think there are even a couple of cases of full recovery from HIV now, all traces gone from system.

It's also fascinating to see how it was thought of as "impossible" for anyone but gay men to catch it for such a long time... but the gay community did an excellent job of getting it under control relatively quickly by being careful... and these days, the majority of HIV transmission is from intravenous drug use. And even then, heroin users can live for years if not decades with HIV despite having extremely poor general health.