Abby Landy: My HIV Battle

Abby Landy for WHO. Photo: WHO Magazine

Told she was HIV positive in 2012, Abby Landy thought it was the end of her life.

"I don't want to live with this," she told her doctor. "I'm out."

She also believed it would affect her friendships and future relationships: "I felt like the poisonous AIDS chick," says the Sydney law student, who contracted the virus from a man she dated briefly in 2012. "My expectation was that nobody would ever want to touch me again."

Keep up with your favourite celebrities in the pages of WHO Magazine by subscribing now.

Now a passionate advocate for the HIV-positive community, Landy later realised that getting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is not the death sentence it was decades ago.

"When it was put into perspective for me, I kind of went, 'Oh, OK, maybe it's not all over,'" says Landy, 26.

Landy, whose story is featured in a new documentary, Transmission: The Journey from AIDS to HIV, was studying law in Melbourne when she met a man at a bar.

At first, she says, he was a "fun guy," but one night, about two weeks later when "we'd both had a bit to drink ... he came back to my place and became quite aggressive sexually," says Landy. She told him to leave.

Two days later, Landy woke with painful cold sores on her lips that within days had also invaded her mouth. As the week wore on, her body began to ache, and a rash appeared on her arm. Within an hour, it had spread across her body.

Suspecting she could be HIV-positive after an online search, she contacted the man to ask if he could have the virus. He responded, "No babe, no way." The man then pressured Landy to meet up again and when she told him she didn't want to see him anymore, his response, via text, was chilling. "Well I hope at least you remember me forever."

To read more about Abby's battle with HIV, pick up this week's WHO, on sale now.