Marin HIV survivor shares odds-beating lifestyle – Marin Independent Journal

Sunday is World AIDS Day, and 35 years after researchers identified the HIV virus as the cause of AIDS, some communities, including Marin, are envisioning the possibility of “getting to zero” — no HIV related deaths and no new infections.

The advent of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV, a pill that can protect from infection when take regularly, is one of the big reasons for such hope. It’s also been determined that HIV does not spread through sexual contact if the person carrying the virus is receiving consistent medication so that the amount of virus in the blood is undetectable.

“We have the tools we need to end the epidemic,” said Dr. Lisa Santora, Marin County deputy public health officer. “For those of us who have worked with this disease for a long time, it is heartening to feel optimistic about the future.”

Even though these innovations come too late for John Marino, one of the 618 Marin residents living with HIV, he has no regrets. Marino, who will celebrate his 75th birthday in March, was infected with HIV in 1981 when he was living in San Francisco.

“You can’t live a life filled with regret; it eats your soul,” Marino said. “It would have been wonderful if it had been different but it wasn’t. It’s like, how much time do you want to spend dying versus how much time do you want to live.”

Marino, who lives in low-income, senior housing in Lucas Valley, credits yoga and alternative medical therapies with helping him beat the odds.

“I never expected to live to be 75,” said Marino, who grew up in Clearfield, a small town in Pennsylvania.

“I was brought up in what in my hometown was considered a mixed marriage because dad was Sicilian and mother was Czech and Hungarian and a tow-head blond,” Marino said.

While Marino earned a bachelor’s in English literature from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, he worked part-time at Mercy Hospital to pay his tuition. After he graduated in 1971, he continued working in hospital administration.

Marino said that before moving to San Francicso he had to hide the fact that is he gay.

“It was largely a clandestine thing,” he said.

Marino said the gay club in Pittsburgh that he went to was operated by the Mafia, and he recalls the doorkeeper there, a black drag queen named Coco, warning the clientele in advance when a police raid was in the offing.

AIDS wasn’t the first serious medical challenge that Marino had to face. He was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis when he was working for the University of Washington managing a community mental health center in 1974.

“I was confronted with the idea that I would live a fairly crippled life and could quite possibly end up living in a wheelchair for the rest of my life,” he said. “On days when the symptoms were really bad, I did take to using a wheelchair around the house.”

It was then that Marino began to study yoga, massage and other alternative medical treatments, which he credits with allowing him to recover his mobility and avoid any new arthritis flare ups until earlier this year. In 1975, he moved to San Francisco to pursue his newfound interest in yoga and massage therapy, working as a gardener to support himself.

“The year that I decided to move out of Seattle we had 10 months of gray skies; it was not very pleasant,” Marino said. “So I moved to San Francisco, the gay mecca of the world at that time.”

“The period of 1975 to the start of the AIDS epidemic was like a gay man’s wildest dream come true,” Marino said. “I mean being in San Francisco, being young, being gay and being free. We were all cashing in on the free love experience of the Summer of Love. The drugs were flowing and the parties were great.”

The party came to an abrupt end, however, with the arrival of AIDS in the early 1980s. In 1984 Marino developed Kaposi’s sarcoma, which according to mainstream medical authorities is a type of cancer that causes purplish lesions to form in the lining of blood and lymph vessels. People infected with HIV have the highest risk of Kaposi’s sarcoma due to their compromised immune systems.

Marino, however, rejected the accepted medical view that Kaposi’s sarcoma is a form of cancer and his doctor’s advice that he treat the lesions with chemotherapy. He chose instead to use a traditional Chinese medicine.

“I’m fortunate that I did that,” he said. “Otherwise, I would have gone the route of many of the people who did the chemotherapy and got worse and worse.”

Marino also resisted taking any of the early drugs for treating HIV, such as azidothymidine (AZT), until 1995.

“My t-cells had dropped significantly and my doctor at that time said, ‘You have to go on the drugs,’” he said.

Marino said he had to quit working full-time and go on disability at that point; otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to afford the medications.

Marino’s only long-term partner died in 2012 of pancreatic cancer.

“I have just never met somebody that appealed in the same way,” Marino said. “For me there is a certain magic that has to be there.”

Marino said his parents didn’t want anyone to know that he was gay or that he had AIDS because they were afraid it would reflect badly on them. Nevertheless, he cared from them when they were too old and sick to take care of themselves.

Marino still works part-time as a massage therapist and yoga instructor. He puts a positive spin on his struggle with rheumatoid arthritis and HIV.

Regarding arthritis, he said, “I’ve very often think about it as training wheels. I really feel I was blessed with that illness because it caused me to take a look at myself early on.”

And as for HIV, Marino said, “In some respects, a life-threatening illness will help an individual heal. I really feel that’s the case for me. Nothing makes you live a cleaner life than being confronted with a life-threatening disease.”

Since the first Marin AIDS case was reported in 1982, 1,445 Marin residents have been diagnosed with the disease and 837 have died.

In 2018, there were 19 new cases of HIV infection and two deaths among people with HIV reported in Marin. Between 2010 and 2018, Marin County averaged 18 new HIV infections per year.

According to UNAIDS, an estimated 1.7 million people worldwide became infected with HIV and 770,000 died from AIDS in 2018. UNAIDS estimates there are 37.9 million people globally living with HIV; 32 million have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the epidemic.

New HIV infections have been reduced by 40% since the peak in 1997. AIDS-related deaths have been reduced by more than 56% since the peak in 2004.

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