Finding out: SUE: I imagine I must've felt, 'How can this be happening? This is unbelievable. And thank you very much, Mrs Thatcher and your bloody government for cancelling the medical amount of money that was supposed to be going into cleaning up blood supplies, so we didn't need to have dirty blood from America with whatever diseases was in it'. After the haemophilia we've got all through all that, only to be hit with this which was just completely unnecessary.
Finding out: DAVID: I remember when he was diagnosed I went with him to the hospital, the two of us coming away, and we'd just been told, yes he has HTLV 3 or 4, something like that. But he had a 50 per cent chance of living for the next two years and if he lived for two years he'd be all right after that. Absolute rubbish of course! But I remember coming away and thinking, what do you say? How do you build up 50 per cent? What can I say to him? It was very difficult to think of something to say.
Support: DAVID: I remember going to a meeting there [Haemophilia Society] and I felt oh God, it's like the First World War! The Generals sitting there [laughing] in their house a long way from the line, saying "Do this! Do that! Do the other" and there was, in the case of Birchgrove, they were the people there who were sort of wiping the sick out of other people's mouths...
Family relationships: DAVID: Yes, Sue was Chair of Somerset AIDS - and as I said, I think she was upset about looking after people who were dying in the same way that Bob was going to die. This did upset her a bit, a lot. I think it was a situation which I didn't understand at all. I felt very guilty about it because people had said of us, 'Gosh, they'll never divorce, they've always been together'. So I felt guilty, that it must be my fault.
Hepatitis C: DAVID: I think it affected him worse than anything else because he was on Interferon for a year and in that year I met him a couple of times abroad, we used to go athletics meetings abroad and on two occasions when he's been there he's taken his Interferon and the next day he sort of laid on his bed, breathing slowly and thinking, "Oh God, don't let me die in some God forsaken town."
Support: DAVID: Yes, we do a lot of counsel speak and a lot of talking, we are exceptionally honest.
SUE: But the thing for you and me, our generation, when we were brought up we didn't have 'feelings'.
DAVID: No.
SUE: You weren't allowed.
DAVID: No.
SUE: And so when the counsellor said to me, 'How do you feel?' I said, 'Well, what do you mean?'
DAVID: Yes, yes, that's a point. I said to you, in the last three or four years I have been more emotional than I ever have previously and it's the result of counselling and finding out all sorts of things, or not finding out, saying the words of them.