The first time I walked into Dr. Paul Bellman's office, he said 'I want you to know that you can survive this thing.' He looked like Vincent Van Gogh if the painter had gone to a yeshiva: pale skin, red beard, soulful eyes. Unlike his double, however, he didn't appear to be crazy.

His prognosis floored me. Although I'd never been sick a day from this virus, I'd been HIV-positive for 15 years and assumed that sooner or later, my number would be up. In fact, the number of my T-cells had recently slipped into the danger zone and sent me into a panic. Rather than sounding the death knell, however, Bellman was telling me that the dark ages of AIDS were over, a whole new paradigm of treatment and underestanding emerging. I'd living to see the day so many less fortunate had only dreamed of--the day when AIDS was being reclassified from a fatal disease to a manageable illness. It was time to reclaim the future, and turn our thoughts fromchecking out to planning for an indefinite future.

The reason for Bellman's optimism--echoed by the scientific community at the World AIDS Conference in Vancouver last July--centers on a new family of drugs called protease inhibitors, the first of which was approved by the FDA in December 1995. Estimated to be 1,000 times more effective than drugs such as AZT (especially used in combination with them), protease inhibitors represent the first major breakthrough in AIDS treatment since the epidemic began. Although they don't rid the body of HIV, protease inhibitors block its ability to reproduce, giving the patient's immune system a chance to restore itself--even when the immune system is seriously damaged.

This good news was thrilling, but puzzling too, inviting a whole new line of inquiry. There was even, you might say, a kind of loss. HIV had, after all, affected every major life choice I'd made for over a decade. In 1986, the year my first lover died, I quit my glitzy publishing job and left New York to study with a spiritual master. I began to understand the upside of having a death sentence: the rush of danger that snaps you awake, makes life urgent, pushes you to travel harder, faster, deeper, wider while there's still time. Despite the terror of living with HIV--because of it, really--my life had become more focused, more creative, and more authentic than ever before. Though it sounds strange, in many critical ways HIV actually saved my life.