I was diagnosed nearly 14 years ago, after a routine health check through my health insurance policy in America. I got a call saying 'You have to come in; one of the tests is positive', and I have to say it was the last thing I assumed it would be. I'd been married for about three years; I was only 23 when I was diagnosed.

At the time I thought I was doing a marvellously good job coping with what essentially felt like a life sentence. I think I initially was quite stoical about it. The doctor was saying things like, 'There's no cure, there's no treatment, but don't worry you might live ten years'. So I thought, 'Ok, I'm 23 I might live to 33, I might live to 33.'

I felt like I'd let a lot of people down. I'd gone to America to do bigger and better things, to go to college, to be the nice middle class white girl I'd been brought up to be, not to go and come back with a life threatening disease. It's a disease unlike any other and I had no role models. I had a couple of friends that were gay and who were positive, we talked about it amongst ourselves but not too much because we were all a bit scared. It's easy to forget that, now that I've been living with it for a long time, but then it seemed like a very scary thing.

I knew immediately that this wasn't something I could keep secret. I was in a fog and my life was all about this diagnosis so it was almost impossible to just discuss all the normal things you talk about when you're 24. I did discuss it very openly with friends and I did notice some relationships cooling off and some people stopped returning calls. I got the feeling that they just couldn't cope with me.

My sexual relationships became pretty difficult to navigate. It transpired that I had picked up HIV from my husband. He'd used heroin and talked about that openly once we were both diagnosed. We broke up partly because I just felt that we both needed to concentrate on our diagnoses separately, that we couldn't really be there for each other. I wasn't really angry with him but I just felt that we needed to go on a separate journey. I didn't date for some time but obviously when I did get back into that frame of mind, you know I was still a young woman, I had lots of rejections. Lots of men have found it incredibly hard to deal with.

When I told my family my father's response was OK initially but when I told him that I was pregnant, even though that was some years later, with all the knowledge and all the changes in HIV, he still felt that it was a heinous, irresponsible decision, that I was making a massive mistake and that he wouldn't stand by and support it. I never saw him again, and he's never seen his grandsons. So yeah, HIV has created quite a lot of upset in my personal relationships really.

'I was in denial'

I'm quite good at putting on a brave face and I think that that's something I have in common with pretty much everybody else that lives with HIV. I'd gone a little bit off the deep end when I discovered I was positive and I really was in denial. I was halfway through film school, I was a grade A student, and I had what I anticipated was a fledgling career in film ahead of me. When I got my diagnosis I soon realised that this ten years that the doctor talked about would be reduced to eight if I continued my studies and did I really want to spend two of my ten years studying, then another two or three being a runner, and a couple of years in the camera department to drop dead just when I got to receive my first Oscar? So life became about doing a lot of math and figuring out how the time left was best spent.

I decided to make as much money as I could so I could travel, go to Venice, jump out of a plane, or whatever list of things I felt I had to do before I kicked the bucket. None of it could be accomplished without a great deal of money so I became a bit of a workaholic and thereby quite conveniently hid lots of things that I might have to have faced if I'd not been throwing myself into work. I managed to cope for about three years doing that, working hard, partying hard, travelling hard, wearing very expensive shoes, and then I hit a wall when I realised that that wasn't making me very happy. Yes I'd been on the boat and seen the sunset and I'd worn Manolos for three seasons and I drove a really nice car, but actually I was kind of miserable and kind of lonely, so I decided to return to England and get back into film. I became a freelance make up artist.

I met somebody and told him I was positive and he didn't seem phased in the slightest, and he was really the first man that that I'd told who didn't respond badly. I became pregnant very quickly, about three months into our relationship, and that for me was the biggest crossroads in my journey with HIV. Discovering I was pregnant and realising that I'd been told very clearly by the doctor that that was not an option for me, and assuming that I would be frog-marched to the nearest abortion clinic for behaving so incredibly irresponsibly.

Things had changed within HIV and because my head had been so firmly in the sand I'd just not been aware of it. When I did actually present at six weeks pregnant, tail between my legs, I discovered that there were choices. Combination therapy had recently been tested, people were beginning to do quite well on it, doctors were feeling cautiously optimistic, and positive women were choosing to have children. I realised that I had a choice. Till that point I didn't feel like I had any choices, like all my choices had been removed at diagnosis and that was a really watershed moment for me.

I felt I needed more information to make an intelligent decision about whether to keep the pregnancy, which brought me to the London Lighthouse. Coming through the doors was quite hard as I had a lot of prejudices around HIV myself but I remember it was packed full of normal kids, infected and affected. I was taken for a coffee by one of the senior childcare workers, I got registered, I sat down with somebody who'd been living with HIV who was incredibly open, and I met a woman who was positive, all in the same afternoon. It blew my mind wide open. I discovered that I believed that things would be OK and no matter whether the kid was positive or not I'd cope.

A symbolic act

Both my pregnancies were very clinically managed and as a result I had two negative kids. I started on combination therapy in my third trimester. I remember leaving with this enormous bag of pills and putting it off for about ten days. You need to start in the third trimester so your immune system is as strong as possible at point of delivery, but I remember sitting looking at these drugs for a good week. I found that first dose incredibly hard. It was a very symbolic act.

I've been on about five or six combinations since then, over nearly ten years. They're a weighty burden of pills to take but then I've normalised them, that's just become my life.

I've had huge difficulties. Initially I became resistant to AZT and got stuck on a second combination, which gave me nerve damage in my hands and feet. So I had to shift off that combination and went on to another one that was fine for a while, but had weight problems and constant diarrhoea, so that was shifted onto another set that gave me bright yellow eyes, terribly jaundiced. I didn't actually mind, because I couldn't see them, but the doctor said, 'You've got really yellow eyes' and I bumped into a friend who asked if I'd been drinking. I got shifted off those and I'm now on a combination that's been working very well for about a year. But again it's pill popping and having to take them at the right time, and having to remember not to miss any. But it's ok, they're manageable problems.

I'm a lot more optimistic than I was 14 years ago, but I think probably like most people with HIV it's a guarded optimism. For me, sending so many friends into the ground as I did, I'll probably never shake that fear and slight disbelief when doctors tell me lots of positive things because my experience tells me differently. Their experience is right now as clinicians dealing with people and their results and their data show them things, but my eyes have seen others and that sense of loss is difficult to shake off when you've lost a lot of people to the same thing.

I'm amazed that I've outlived my expiration date by four years. I've seen my kids grow and I didn't really expect to be around for them as long as I have. But there's always a but. The combinations are great, they're definitely keeping me alive, but my experience again with them, having been on a series of them is that they work well for a while then they stop working. So obviously I keep hoping that the medical establishment keeps up, the pharmaceutical industry keeps up, and they're one step ahead of me and there's always something new. I think I've lived through an extraordinary time in terms of seeing the changes in HIV and I think I've been incredibly lucky to be on the medications. I'm only alive because the drugs enable me to fight this disease.

The recent case in the news about the prosecution and sentencing of the woman for transmitting HIV, things like that just scare me and act as an interesting kind of reminder as to really how far we've got to go, how little we've actually done at educating anyone out there. Which is again what I find when I speak to teenagers, I go into schools and talk to them about sexual health and HIV, the kind of questions that are being asked show me that they've just got no idea. So my positivity and my own personal experiences are always tempered by that sadness. We are still working blind in a society that really doesn't want to know or finds it easier to be judgemental rather than understand.