Magic Johnson knows he’s a lucky man, said Allison Samuels in TheDailyBeast.com. Twenty years after the basketball great announced he’d contracted HIV, he’s alive and well. Back in 1991, when he startled the world by disclosing that he’d been infected, the disease was usually fatal.
“Hands down, the first five years were the most difficult for me,” he says. “There were those moments when thoughts came like, ‘What if I don’t make it?’ But they were fleeting. I couldn’t let myself stay there for long.” Eighteen months before it was approved for the general public, Johnson was one of the first patients to try a new, powerful cocktail of antiretroviral medications. The cocktail worked, suppressing the virus’s replication so completely that he never developed AIDS.
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