So I'm happy about the election, unhappy about the snow (it's snowing), and shocked at a girl I met this week. She's 19, and while I was explaining that for our program she would have a physical and an HIV test, she looked at me and asked me if HIV is hereditary. I was shocked...I said no, and explained that it could be possible for a mother to infect her baby when it was born. She looked at me again, and said "well, then, how do you get it?"

Seriously? I wrote to a friend about this and asked where Pam Stenzel was when this girl was in high school. She went to a Catholic school, but still...are we just not teaching young people about HIV transmission anymore? Or is she an outlier?

So I explained briefly about bodily fluids and blood transfusions (she didn't know what they were), and when I was done, she looked at me and shrugged her shoulders and said "Well, I hope I don't have it!" Me too...