break had come to an end. Again I started the daily drive to Vereeniging. But by then I realised that something incontrovertibly extraordinary was happening with my body. I was taking all my antiretroviral tablets twice a day, observantly and carefully. It certainly was not a breeze. The protease inhibitors in particular were difficult and unpleasant. The tablets were bulky and hard to swallow. At room temperature the precious drug soon degraded and lost its efficacy. The plastic capsules became blistered and started bleeding their contents. So they had to be kept chilled at all times – for the eighteen months I took them – making travelling very complicated.
What was more, the protease inhibitors left an utterly vile taste. Two hours after taking them, morning and evening, my stomach would erupt in gastric protest. For months after starting on them, I battled nausea. I also developed what the doctors call ‘peripheral neuropathy’ – nerve endings that responded badly to the new chemicals in the body. In my case, the nerve response manifested as perioral neuropathy. My teeth and sinuses became intensely and painfully sensitive. I remember coming into the kitchen one morning and biting into what seemed a deliciously tempting watermelon slice someone had left out of the fridge overnight. The room-temperature contact caused me to wince and then weep with pain. It was far too cold for my agonisingly ultra-sensitive teeth.
But all this was trivial beside the growing realisation that something quite unmistakably dramatic was taking place within my body. My tiredness was lessening. It was disappearing. In its place, I could feel a daily access of miraculous new energy. Life forces were coursing through my body. Illness was yielding to a nearly novel feeling – renewed and joyful wellbeing. Every evening, every morning, every long court day in Vereeniging, as I heard evidence in court, evidence of a different kind presented itself to me through my body. It was there – in the way my blood coursed through my veins, the way I heard myself breathe, the way my muscles felt. I not only regained my appetite – despite the nausea the protease inhibitors induced when I took them, I became ravenously and continuously hungry. For the first time in months, my stomach was digesting food properly. And my gaunt body avidly claimed every morsel of it to make up for the twelve kilograms (twenty-five pounds) in weight I had lost.
There was only one word for it. It was glorious. The drugs were working. I could feel that I was getting healthy again. I knew that I would be well again. That, in turn, spurred my inner confidence. Physiological wellbeing had a pronounced psychic effect. If the drugs were working – and it was utterly clear that they were – it meant that for the first time since my infection more than twelve years before, the virus was no longer multiplying within me. It was no longer progressively taking over my body, taking over my life. It was being beaten back to some deeply secluded (although still latently dangerous) viral reservoirs. But outside those recesses the rest of my body was free of it. And my immune system was, for the first time in all these years, free of its burdens.
The feeling was exhilarating. For the first time in more than a decade I was no longer – no longer felt – contaminated. From the world I had little to hide, and less to fear.
In December, just days after the meeting in Judge-President Fried-man’s chambers, my computer analyst sister Jeanie, her scientist husband Wim, and their two children joined me for a few days in Cape Town. After my original HIV diagnosis in 1986, I made a secret promise to myself – while they were young I would offer each year to take my niece Marlise and nephew Graham for a short pre-Christmas holiday in Cape Town. The beneficial delight in the beaches, long drives, silly vacation movies and chatter was, I always suspected, more wholly mine than theirs. The glorious Cape sun always blessed us with indolence. It was perfect rest. But each year we did one incontestably strenuous thing. We climbed Table Mountain.
Perhaps one of the best-known sights in the world, the sandstone massif dominates Table Bay. For hundreds of years, since Sir Francis Drake’s voyage around the world, the view of it and the view from it have arrested travellers, justly evoking lyrical descriptions. The whole mountain is now a nature reserve, jealously guarded by Capetonians and the conservationists and researchers from all over the world who treasure and study and walk amidst its priceless floral and faunal heritage.
The mountain rises 1 000 metres above sea level, its sheer rock faces hundreds of metres high. From a distance, the famous ‘table’ front looks like a monolith of rock. It is not. The frontal rock is deeply split by a gorge that angles across and into its face. Platteklip Gorge is a particular hikers’ favourite, and one of the best-known routes to the top. In the 1940s Churchill’s ally, South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, favoured it for his regular walks.
We decided to tackle Table Mountain. On International Human Rights Day, 1997, early on a startlingly sunny morning, we started the ascent. My brother-in-law, Wim, was not as keen as the rest of us. But with an accustomed family mix of infectious enthusiasm and browbeating coercion we persuaded him to join us. Little did we know how well-justified his reluctance was. Two days later he was diagnosed with acute appendicitis and had to be rushed into hospital for emergency surgery.
But at the time no hint of illness of any nature seemed to mar the day. The path up Platteklip Gorge begins at a fresh reservoir of mountain water. As we set out past it I wondered whether I would make it to the top. Just seven weeks before I had not been able to climb forty steps from the common room to my chambers. Now, cleared of the PCP and with the virus incapacitated by four weeks of effective antiretroviral therapy, I proposed to tackle more than eight hundred steps up the face of Table Mountain.
Jeanie and Wim stopped often to check on me. Was I making it? Yes, I was. Not without effort. Not with any speed. But I was making it. Twice the path crosses the stream that feeds the reservoir below. Then it heads steeply into the gorge that splits the sandstone cliffs. I drank deeply, thirstily, from the stream each time. The proteas, ericas, disas and pelargoniums that line the path, magnificently casual in their beauty under the mild December sunshine, seemed to beckon me up and on.
As we reached the top we paused, relieved and exhilarated, before strolling to the cable station restaurant 500 metres away across the flat rock plateau. As so shortly before, the climb had made me breathless, panting and sweating. But this time it was with exuberant joy. I knew that I was well, could be well, would be well. I had been given a second chance. As I gasped in the mountain air, I also knew what a mountain of privilege had brought me there. There was much work to do.
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