HIV-Positive

This book can't save anyone's life, yet it might save someone's sanity: Rimer--who is HIV-positive--and Connolly, an AIDS activist, offer a guide to the maze of hospitals, insurance companies and AIDS service organizations that people who are HIV-positive must find their way through. Theirs is an always comprehensible, often irreverent road map to long-term survival for those who are HIV-positive. Like other books about living with a disease, this one strongly recommends that the afflicted take an active part in the treatment program--learn what questions to ask your physicians, and be willing to circumvent the system's rules and regulations to receive care or not-yet-approved therapies. The authors' main premise is that the medical bureaucracy has a strong built-in tendency to be unmanageable, in part because doctors see themselves as authority figures. And for those who can handle it, their book can be extremely funny. Rimer and Connolly are fond of quizzes. To assess the reader's skills for coping with the difficult ambiguities being HIV-positive poses, they give you one point on a scale of 20 if ``you have successfully filed an auto insurance claim and collected''--sensible enough--and also a point if you ``knew in 1984 that Vanessa Williams would become a star.'' You get two points if you've been `` `treated' by a psychiatrist for homosexuality,'' but lose two if you ``still live with your parents'' or ``believe that insurance companies are altruistic.'' Gallows humor aside, there are many useful tips, too: how to get your T4 cell count measured (anonymously); how to tell ``red-flag'' symptoms from those not related to HIV, and how to hire a doctor who's on your side--ego and all. (Jan.)