From Abruption to Chronicity: Temporalities of Long‐Term HIV Survival in Norway

ABSTRACT

Since the mid‐1990s, combination antiretroviral therapy (ART) has transformed HIV from a fatal diagnosis into a manageable long‐term condition. For the first time, a large cohort of people who once expected to die young are now growing old with HIV. This article examines how long‐term survivors narrate and make sense of a life shaped by two linked turning points: First, a diagnosis that was widely understood as a death sentence; and second, the arrival of effective treatment, which abruptly reopened a future that had been foreclosed. Drawing on life‐history interviews with 21 people living with HIV aged 50 and older in Norway the article shows that diagnosis was experienced as a terminal rupture that cancelled plans, relationships, and long‐term commitments. The subsequent stabilisation of effective therapy did not simply restore what had been lost; it introduced a second upheaval, compelling participants to rebuild a life they had not expected to live. I propose the concept of prognostic horizon reversal to name this therapy‐driven shift in expected life horizons and to clarify how it reshapes biography, responsibility and the practical work of planning for a future under conditions of ongoing treatment, clinical monitoring and the lingering traces of earlier crisis.