"It's just..."
For a full five seconds the words hang in the spring sunshine as the woman tries to convey in words something few of us can even imagine.
"It's like an attempt against your life.
"But it's so subtle and it creeps up so subtly that you don't even perceive it as that. But until you finally come to that realisation it's the only thing that can transform and heal what you've gone through.
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"Before that it's just swimming endlessly and having no aim, no way to cope."
The 38-year-old Sydney massage therapist sitting across the road from the Downing Centre District Court is HIV-positive, a diagnosis which entitles her to anonymity under NSW law.
Ten years ago she was infected by a man - Chris Muronzi - who knew he was carrying the disease but maliciously decided to have unprotected sex with her on six separate occasions.
Thanks to an appalling conspiracy of circumstances, including the negligence of doctors at an eastern suburbs medical clinic where she went to get tested, the woman then accidentally passed the disease to her new partner before she was diagnosed.
She has just come from the courtroom where Muronzi, a 42-year-old Australian of Zimbabwean descent, appeared in a brief sentencing hearing on the charge of maliciously inflicting grevious bodily harm, a charge which carries a maximum seven-year jail sentence.
