My world was one of hospitals, pain, fear and, right from my earliest memory, death. Being born with severe haemophilia, if I was lucky my parents were told, I might live to the age of 21.

If haemophiliacs cut or bang themselves, they don’t stop bleeding. Our bodies don’t produce a chemical in the blood: Factor VIII. From my earliest understanding, mortality was rammed into my face. If I banged my head or somebody hit me in the stomach, I would die.

Factor VIII is manufactured into a product that is injected into you. Haemophilia treatments were experimental and, looking back now, the torturous things they did to me as a child would never be allowed today. As a toddler I had my arm tied to a cot side in a bandaged wooden splint, lying down for hours while connected to a big metal machine that we referred to as ‘the clock’. A 60ml syringe would sit in the top and, as the time went down, it gradually infused the treatment. I couldn’t move with a great big needle in my arm: if I did, it hurt, and nobody listened.

Factor concentrate was produced by pooling human blood plasma from multiple donors. They were harvesting blood from prisoners and prostitutes in the US: ‘skid row donors’, being paid for blood. Viruses and contaminants got into the treatment. Billions of bottles of treatment were injected straight into the veins of little boys like me.

It isn’t just that you don’t stop bleeding. Haemophilia also destroys your joints. I was kept in hospital for six weeks for a knee operation and tested for various things without consent. They had access to my bone tissue, blood, urine. You name it, they had the samples. We were seen as tools to research.

On the day I was discharged we came down from the ward at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, through the haemophilia centre reception where a nurse popped up from behind the hatch, like something out of a Punch and Judy show, and shouted across the room, ‘Mr and Mrs Ward, do you want to know Mark’s HIV results?’ Then, without waiting for an answer, ‘He’s positive. See you next time.’

Aged 12, just a little boy, I had been infected through the use of contaminated blood. I’d heard of the AIDS crisis by 1984 when I received my diagnosis. The pictures we saw on television were AIDS victims looking like skeletons, dying. That was my fate. I blocked it out. I didn’t want to think like that. Perhaps there was a little bit of arrogance because I’d virtually bled to death so many times. Death? Oh, please. So ‘last year’.

I had to go back a couple of days later. They said, ‘Tell nobody because we can’t guarantee your safety.’ Ryan White was a haemophiliac in the United States who, exactly the same as me, was given HIV through contaminated blood products. His family were run out of town. The same was happening here.

They also told me, at the age of 14, you’re not going to make it to school-leaving age. If I was lucky, I had three years. The life I had, full of hopes, stopped. Because of the haemophilia, on flights we were always taken onto the plane first and shown the flight deck. All I’d ever wanted to do, for as long as I could remember, was work with aeroplanes: that was the career that I’d dreamed of.
I rejected everything they told me, simply refused to believe. I pursued my life. I left school. I joined British Airways on their youth training scheme. I told BA about the haemophilia, not the HIV. I told nobody. Life carried on as normal – or, at least, normal for me. I embarked on a fantastic career, going to places I never expected to see. The first time I got off a jumbo jet in Sydney, Australia, I wanted to cry. I went to a phone

‘Mum, I’m here, in Sydney, Australia, calling you from tomorrow because of the time difference. All those people that said I wouldn’t do it, just think how wrong they are today.’

But there was still my dark secret. I had to live every minute of every day, enjoy every second, because it was soon going to be taken from me. When somebody says to you, ‘You’re lucky, you’ve got three years to live,’ that clock is ticking. When you get down to zero, you’re living on borrowed time. That’s where I’ve spent most of my life now, living on borrowed time. My sell by date was sometime in the 1980s.

You adapt.

While working at British Airways I ventured onto the gay scene in London, but with ‘blinkers’ in terms of information from the hospital. I asked were there many gay haemophiliacs and I was told there weren’t any; there’s no such thing. By contrast, on the gay scene, you had it really in your face about safe sex. There was information and hope. In the haemophilia world, the subject of homosexuality, actually of sex itself, wasn’t talked about.

There were no HIV medications yet. When I went out on a Saturday night with my friends, was it my last? Every time I went on an aeroplane, when those wheels left the runway, my first thought was: you made it into the air again.

Most of my career was working in cargo. I was certified to check hazardous cargo, including radioactive and livestock, ensuring it was safe to go on board an aircraft. There I was on a Monday, checking a radioactive box going to Lagos. Mark Ward did his job – great. On Tuesday I’d walk into the Royal Free and was  treated as a vegetable who supposedly couldn’t understand results. But how compassionate, how caring, how different life was if you had HIV. On the haemophilia unit I was disposable, whereas the HIV unit was cups of tea and jollity. Identifying us as being positive meant another cash cow through the door: they could tap into research resources and funding, gaining kudos by becoming experts in our suffering, our misery.

Later, with the freedom of information act, calls went out for compensation. Something needed to be done. Margaret Thatcher set up a scheme, the MacFarlane Trust, to alleviate the suffering of haemophiliacs and families who were infected with the HIV virus through contaminated blood products. But we had to fight for it. I say ‘we’, but at that point in time, I was at BA living for the moment. Meanwhile there were brave haemophiliacs, most sadly no longer with us, who got the wheels of justice and the campaign rolling. The scheme, set up in 1988, provided an ex gratia payment which effectively gave us a begging bowl, turning us from victims into charity cases. Just shy of 5,000 haemophiliacs were given Hepatitis C through contaminated blood products. Of that number, 1,249 were given the HIV virus, which doesn’t include wives and partners also harmed. Of those, 200 are alive today. I’m a minority within a minority within a minority.

I like to learn. If I understand something then maybe I can do something about it. When I was young, I had no choice. I wasn’t informed. It happened; it was done to me. As I got older, there were articles in the gay press. I talked to people. I got involved with charity fundraising which meant I saw support services. I had a thirst for knowledge. I needed to know because I’d come to the conclusion that what the hospital was telling me was different to reality.

When I approached the gay subject once again, my consultant told me that there were only very few gay haemophiliacs and they lived solitary lives. They certainly don’t have sex. If that’s the path that I ‘chose’, because I had AIDS, I should abstain.

  In 1991, I was informed my Hepatitis C infection had taken place years earlier, they believed at the same time as my HIV. Then in 1995, again through the treatment, I got CMV – another nasty virus. With a compromised immune system it was almost certainly a death sentence. That’s when my proper diagnosis of AIDS kicked in. My parents took me to the hospital because I collapsed. I asked the same consultant that had talked about abstaining. ‘How could I have got this?’

‘It’s your lifestyle, because you’re gay.’

I was mortified. My mum and dad were there, and I was blamed for what I had inside me. Yes, I was going out on the gay scene; yes, I was having a fabulous time, but sex wasn’t part of it. Going out with my friends and having a blast made me happy. I didn’t have anybody in my life because why would I want somebody when I was going to die? I just lived every minute that I could. Yet inside the hospital all of that was discredited. I was made to feel dirty.

The prognosis wasn’t good. Weeks, possibly. The treatment was ganciclovir via slow infusion.

My dad said, ‘His mum can do that at home.’

They insisted I had to be hospitalised.

My dad said, ‘It’s not up for question. If my boy’s going to die, he’s coming home with me.’

My mum had been doing my injections since 1978. I had a cannula so all it meant was attaching a tube. She could do that.

My weight dropped to four stone, my CD4 went down to 0.002, my hair started to fall out. Ganciclovir is harsh on your body, you can’t eat. Because I was already really emaciated, they were concerned it was that which would kill me. But, guess what? Mark Ward proved them wrong. Mark Ward doesn’t play by the rules. I got home and didn’t stop eating. Beneath my mum’s living room light, attached to a drip, I stuffed my face in front of the television: huge roast dinners followed by a pack of chocolate eclairs, sausage sandwiches, chip sandwiches, curries. By the time I’d finished the ganciclovir two weeks later, I’d put half a stone back on.

Coming back from the brink once again reinforced my perception that professionals didn’t always know what they were talking about.  After the CMV, they put me onto AZT, Septrin and some other – clarithromycin, I think it was – antibiotics. Meanwhile I was going out and living, hitting all the clubs. Weekends started on a Wednesday, ended on a Monday morning. When I walked into a club, I wasn’t Mark the haemophiliac, I wasn’t Mark the AIDS victim, I was the Mark party animal. I loved the music, had some brilliant times and don’t regret a second. And, in a weird way, it saved me. I would come in from a club and think, I ain’t going to take these bloody tablets. They just made me feel so crap, so I didn’t bother. Sometimes I’d take them, sometimes I wouldn’t. The fact that I liked to party hard got me through.

Friends set up a campaign group called Tainted Blood, and I was asked to join. I became part of the committee. Now I have my own project for people with a bleeding disorder who identify as gay or bisexual, providing sexual health education, awareness: the things that they failed to do for me and my friends. I’ve been proud to represent the haemophilia community, officially as the world’s first LGBT Ambassador for Haemophilia since 2019. During the covid pandemic I used my statements to the Infected Blood Inquiry to help me form the structure in writing my memoir Bleeding Fabulous, published in November 2024. I speak from the heart – for those little boys that didn’t make it. They’re all my blood brothers and sisters. If I die now, everything I’ve gone through hasn’t been in vain – if I can save one life.