A tragic story

I posted this earlier on The Local's discussion forum, in response to the story of the Swedish woman who had kept her HIV-positive status from her husband for nine years and given birth to two children during that time.

This is a story that I heard while I was on holiday in the Caribbean, on a radio call-in programme.

A young woman, who had always saved herself for Mr. Right, met a visiting tourist while working as a manager at a popular tourist hotel near the beach of this island. They established a connection and kept in touch when he returned home to New York. Over the period of a year, they wrote to each other and arranged to meet each other's families. They were married nearly two years after they first met. She lost her virginity on her wedding night.

They decided to settle on the island and lived happily there together. About 4 years after the wedding, she got a new job and needed to do a medical examination to qualify for the new company's medical insurance scheme. Two weeks later she was summoned to the medical examiner's office where she was informed that she was HIV-positive. She was stunned. She re-did the test and once again received a positive result. Shattered, she attempted to establish how she could have been infected, whether it could have been at the dentist, or anything like that. The only person she had ever had sex with in her whole life was her husband. And she did not suspect him, he was such a loving, faithful husband. She began to take precautions, always using a condom so as not to affect her husband, but dreading the thought of having to tell him of her illness. Six months later when her husband was on an overseas trip, she rang his mother in New York, her conscience heavily weighted. Tears streaming down her face, she sobbed out her request. She need her mother-in-law's help, she said, to break this terrible news to her husband. There was an awkward pause at the other end of the line. She thought that dear mother-in-law might be angry, that she would be accused of cheating. To her utter astonishment, her mother-in-law said:

"Didn't he tell you?"

"Tell me what?" sobbed the poor woman.

"That he was HIV-positive."

The son had been HIV-positive long before he met the dear sweet girl and married her. Not once had he mentioned his dreaded affliction, not once. When this story broke, she had full-blown AIDS and was on her deathbed. Before this, she had had a near-complete mental breakdown and had spent a substantial period of time under observation. Dear hubby, needless to say, was gone. Before he finally left, he had apologised, said he loved her, and that he had always intended to tell her. He had just been unable to bring himself to do it. It was unclear whether he had left because of the shame or due to cowardice. The woman died in a hospice 3 years ago.