My Cancer Was Actually HIV

Dianne’s Divorce Left Her With Far More Than A Broken Heart.

- Emma Levett

It started as a normal day at work for Dianne Nyoni but, while she’d been used to feeling sick with chest infections and inexplicable muscle aches for the last few months, this was the day, in March 2010, when her body said, enough.

“I started feeling really confused,” Dianne tells New Idea. “It was really frightening. I was crying and that’s all I remember until I woke up in hospital with this lovely nurse telling me I’d had a seizure.”

Having given Dianne scans and tests, the doctors scrambled to work out what was wrong with the then 42-year-old mother-of-four from Sydney, NSW.

“In a way it was a relief as I’d been sick for so long,” Dianne says. “I was missing toenails, I’d lost weight, I was getting migraines and coughs and I looked like death.”

Dianne with her son Marco*, then 18 months old, who was thankfully spared. Right: Dianne at her wedding with the ex husband (face blurred) who left her with the virus.

But while initially everything was pointing towards brain cancer, a blood test that was done on spec came back positive.

“The doctor came in to see me with the results of my HIV test and she just nodded. She was telling me I had HIV,” Dianne says.

Incredibly, Dianne took the diagnosis as a good thing in comparison to the terminal cancer diagnosis she’d expected. But, of course, there were a lot of things she needed to get her head around. Like how on earth she’d got it.