Not only is tomorrow Halloween, but it is also a Saturday.  Lots of folks (including me) will be heading out into the night to celebrate after the little ones finish their trick-or-treating.  Halloween is one of my favourite excuses for a party and a party is an excuse to step away from the busyness of work and life, to let your hair down, do some things you might not normally do, and generally have a good time.  While chocolate-makers use Valentine’s Day to peddle their wares, we in the Health Promotion department are claiming this holiday to push our products – safer sex and safer drug use.

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I’ve always found the phrase “sleeping like a baby” such a farce. When my kids were babies, they slept as little and as lightly as they could. Talking to adults, we often joke about how much we would sleep if possible- a nap in the afternoon, no pressures to get us out of bed in the morning. Sleep is a precious escape, a restorative process that allows one to go to bed tired and wake up ready to face another day. The challenge is that’s not always how it goes.

HIV diagnosis is reason enough to cause sleeplessness. Dealing with a new identity, a new set of health considerations, disclosure, treatment considerations and all the rest is enough to keep anyone awake. Once you get into a worrying pattern of sleeplessness it’s hard to get out. Mental and physical symptoms can ensue. Depression can lead to insomnia and vice versa, creating a vicious circle that’s hard to escape.  Anxiety, depression’s hyper cousin, is also a player in insomnia, creating havoc as you try to calm down to get to sleep or stay asleep.

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I live in a beautiful city.  Vancouver is beautiful because of the clean air and close proximity to mountains, ocean, lakes and forests.  It is also beautiful because of its diversity of people and neighbourhoods.  There is a gritty, urban industrial side to this city, but also one that is quaint, clean and picturesque.  What Vancouver is not, is affordable.  When the Economist ranks Vancouver as the world’s most livable city, they ought to include the qualification “if money is no object for you”.  According to Forbes, we also had the 6th most overpriced real estate market in the world in 2007, second only to Los Angeles in North America.  The number of people living on the streets and the lack of affordable housing are overwhelming; we have an increasingly undeniable housing crisis.  Studies are beginning to prove what we have known all along—that housing affects overall health and well-being, and that it is a key factor in determining the health of people living with HIV.

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Last week’s retreat was another huge success and many women came away connected and recharged, according to the evaluations. Retreats are unlike any other thing we offer. They are a whole weekend of symbolic unpacking by a variety of women with a range of life experiences (one attendee commented on the diversity of women and how well everyone got along). Women unpack their sadness of being diagnosed and feeling they can never look at life with hope again. Women can unpack their worries about going on treatment and how it might affect their bodies. Women unpack their long-term experiences with HIV, how they have made changes and stayed healthy. Women unpack their vulnerabilities and their successes, and share them.

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Thanks to Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR) 21,000 people living with HIV in Rwanda received a generic triple fixed-dose combination antiretroviral drug called Apo-TriAvir, produced by the Canadian generic pharmaceutical manufacturer Apotex.  And thanks to the completely convoluted, inefficient and backward process that is CAMR, they stopped receiving these life-saving meds after just one year—not good for their own health and not at all good in terms of avoiding future drug-resistance.  A handful of the people who I respect most in the world (including the folks at the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network) are fighting hard to have CAMR reformed so that it can actually work to get HIV meds where they are needed, in the quantity needed, for a price that developing countries can afford.  While they valiantly slog through the process of trying to get Bills S-232 and C-393 passed by the Canadian Senate and House of Commons respectively, I would like to take this opportunity to rant about the undeniable impracticality and outright inutility of CAMR as it stands.

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