on sabbatical

[strippedscrew]

Hey folks. It's been awhile, I know. Between broken girlparts, a broken bank account, and a broken heart, I haven't had much to write about that would have been worth reading, so I just spared you and went AWOL for a time. Life is on the mend in many ways, however, although that may also just be a mental illusion caused by the rare phenomena of

Comments

[aparecida]

About six months ago, I was told that I almost certainly had herpes, although they didn't have the means to do a test for it at the time. I cried for months, my then-partner refused to have sex with me or even touch me sexually, and a former partner who found out called me and screamed at me. Finally I found a place to get a blood test done, and ... it was negative. Turns out what I had was molluscum contagiosum, a transient have-it-once virus along the order of chicken pox or something, which can be transmitted sexually or just by touching -- children frequently spread it between them, and in my case I picked it up from the dressing room at the strip club I used to work at. Anyway, I was really angry.

A friend of mine was told she had HPV, cried a lot, was horribly stigmatized by her friends, and ended up marrying her boyfriend for really no other reason than that she figured he must have it too and she was afraid no one else would ever want to have sex with her. Several months later, she found out that she didn't have HPV at all; she'd simply had a few skin tags that the doctors had misdiagnosed as genital warts.

[strippedscrew]

1.) I hadn't realized that blood testing for herpes was so recently developed.
2.) Crying for months and being screamed at by a former partner due to misdiagnosis is pretty rough.
3.) Being stigmatized by friends and marrying the wrong person due to misdiagnosis is altogether and horribly worse.
4.) In defense of doctors, herpes and varicella (chicken pox) are closely related and I've heard this confusion before.
5.) In attack of doctors, it shouldn't be that difficult to determine the difference between HPV and skin tags.
6.) No one should be stigmatized, screamed at, or denied (all forms of)pleasure due to carrying a sexually transmitted infection. When did we decide that giving someone a cold or the flu was forgiveable, but giving them chlamydia was not? At the same point we decided that sex was dirty, secret, and shameful, that's when. Knowledge of your health status is necessary for sexually active persons and that knowledge carries with it responsibility in both action and attitude. I don't deny that for a moment. But many (of course not all) STI's are simple infections that have been demonized by their association with a demonized act.

Okay. I'll stop preaching to the converted now. But I think this may spur my next update. Thanks for that.

[aparecida]

oh, no, sorry about the ambiguity -- what I meant by saying they didn't have the means to do the test at the time was that I went to a Planned Parenthood for the "diagnosis" and they didn't have the financial resources to even do a viral swab culture for herpes, let alone a blood test. They simply didn't offer actual testing for herpes. They told me that I could go get a swab test done somewhere if I wanted but it would have to be in the next day or two to get an accurate result before the blisters burst. I didn't have the money to go to a private gyno and pay for the test since I didn't have insurance at the time, and even if I had had the money, I wouldn't have been able to get an appointment within the next day or two. So I just took them at their word. When school started back, I had free access to the student health clinic which was able to give me a blood test.

I'd understand better if they'd diagnosed herpes and it'd turned out to be chicken pox, but it wasn't -- it was molluscum. When my ex went to student health, they told him after about five seconds' glance that it was definitely not herpes and that it was almost certainly molluscum. Which is why I'm so bitter that a Planned Parenthood gyno with forty years' experience told me it didn't look remotely like anything other than herpes and that he would be greatly surprised if it was anything else.