Not long out of high school in Chicago, Peter McLoyd started using heroin and cocaine in 1972. Soon he was injecting. In the early ’80s he was diagnosed with hepatitis B.
“I’m pretty sure it was from sharing a needle or works with one of my compatriots,” he says.
Doctors didn’t offer much help. “They told me that there was no treatment, and that that was pretty much it,” he says. “They didn’t give me any additional information. They told me, don’t share needles.”
On Valentine’s Day 1997, McLoyd received a double diagnosis—he had tested positive for HIV and hepatitis C.
“I wasn’t shocked,” he says. “I was already showing symptoms. I had been to a couple emergency rooms, and they told me I had PCP pneumonia, which was indicative of having HIV, but I was thoroughly immersed in my addiction. I was basically homeless, living with friends here and there.”
McLoyd’s doctor gave him a referral to a local hospital, but a couple days later the doctor told him to immediately go to the emergency department of Cook County Hospital. He was soon admitted to Ward 20, County’s AIDS ward.
While in the emergency department waiting room, McLoyd overheard two women seated in front of him. “It was very strange, because they were talking about HIV, and not in a stigmatizing way,” he says. One of the women was waiting to be seen by a doctor. “She was like, It’s not something to be worried about or to be afraid of talking about. She seemed pretty knowledgeable.”
The woman talking about HIV was Rae Lewis-Thornton, who first shared her story in 1994, appearing on the cover of Essence magazine.
Hearing Lewis-Thornton, McLoyd says, “It made me very hopeful. I was taking it all in. I was like, Whoa, this is pretty incredible.”
McLoyd was in the hospital for eight days, but not long after being discharged, he was coming back for the hospital’s HIV support group.
“I went every day,” he says. “It was very encouraging. There were mostly African American men and women, many of them were like me, injection drug users or former injection drug users. They had been living with HIV for a while, and so they knew the ins and outs, where to get care and how to find additional resources in the community. I just listened and learned.”
Attending the support group changed his life’s direction, he says. “I completely abstained from heroin, cocaine and any drugs. I was strictly focused on my health and getting an education about HIV. I never relapsed. Certainly, I had moments of self-doubt, but I surrounded myself with people who were knowledgeable.”
By now, McLoyd had gone from volunteering at the CORE Center, Cook County’s recently built medical facility that provided services to people living with HIV, to being employed as a peer educator. In 2000, he met Kathy, a nurse who had started working at the CORE Center, and they became friends.
The two went on an HIV advocates’ group trip to Kenya in 2004, marking a turning point in their relationship. They were married later that year.
Unlike HIV, there was no treatment for hepatitis C at the time other than a combination of injections of pegylated interferon and ribavirin, an oral medication. The treatment was difficult to tolerate because of its side effects, and it wasn’t always successful.
“I took that for six months, and it didn’t work,” McLoyd says. “I agreed to go another six months, and it still didn’t work. It was grueling.”
A few years later, new, more effective and easier to take medications were approved in 2013 and 2014. McLoyd tried treatment again with the one of the new drugs, Sovaldi.
“I had no side effects and I soon cleared the hepatitis C,” he says.
At 70, McLoyd is now retired. He had a serious stroke a few years ago; he now walks with the assistance of a cane and has some difficulties with memory. But he continues serving as a peer educator and tireless advocate.
“People who’ve heard me talk have told me that it was inspirational for them to have somebody who looked like them and had shared a similar experience, to be out and to be willing to talk,” he said.
“I know that there’s still a lot of work to do, especially in terms of normalizing HIV. It’s more normalized than it was 20 years ago, but the work needs to continue.”