I remember when I was a freshman in high school, I was sitting at a lunch table in the cafeteria with 2 of my friends. A pretty blonde girl walked by, she looked very plainly dressed, and sat at the table opposite of us by herself to eat. I wondered why a girl that pretty and thin wasn’t sitting in a crowd of friends.
One of my friends notices me looking at her, and leans over to whisper in my ear, “That’s Rachel, the girl who has herpes, I heard she had sex with just about every guy in the 11th grade, I bet she’s sorry now.”
“How do you know she has herpes?” I asked.
“Because everyone knows, thats why no one will go near her. Lindsay used to be her best friend in middle school, and she told her. Then when they stopped being friends, anytime Rachel would be at a party, Lindsay would go around and tell every guy that they better not get too close to her, or they’ll get herpes too, so it didn’t take long for everyone to find out.”
I instantly felt so sorry for the girl. Pity. I got the “I’m so glad I’m not her” phrase in my head. But then I also got the, “Well that’s what happens when you have sex with too many guys!” phrase in my head.
I lost my virginity to my best friend at 16, and he lost his to me. We were not dating, nor did we, we just were kinda like, “Hey, we gotta lose it some way right?”.
I scored high enough on tests to graduate high school a year early, and get a full scholarship to my dream college. Then I met my first boyfriend, we were together for 2 years. I went to college for 1 of those two years….100 miles away….and saw him on the weekends. But of course I knew that he would never cheat on me…we were too close for that!
We broke up when I was 18. I left college to come back to my mom’s city, to be close to her. When I was 19, I met my 2nd boyfriend. We took it slow and used protection for the first few months, then we just figured that as long as we were monogamous we shouldn’t need to. He told me he had only slept with 3 other girls, and I had only slept with 2 other guys, so the chances of any strain of any disease being present didn’t even cross my mind. A year went by, we were still going strong, starting to talk about the future, marriage, all that dream stuff.
Right before Christmas, I started feeling soreness in my vagina area, just like an ache. I would touch the sides of my groin and my lymph nodes were huge and swollen. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it, I figured it was just some bug my body was trying to get out. Until I peed one night. I sat on the toilet, started to pee, then I felt this burn, like someone literally lit a match right on my vaginal lip, by the opening. It was a burn that jolted through my whole body, it hurt so bad my body automatically stopped peeing, and I just doubled over onto the floor cupping myself. All I could think was, “WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?!”.
After a few minutes it subsided, and I grabbed for a mirror. I looked down there and saw a small, the size of a baby’s pinky finger nail, white lesion. I freaked. I was on the internet faster than a bullet. All the pics I searched on Google for “herpes”, “lesion”, “genital sore”, didn’t look anything like what I had. they all looked like a cluster of small red pimples, when I had a white open sore. I was slightly reassured.
When the next day came, and my blister hurt so bad I could barely get into my car, I knew I had to go the doctor. I was very open with my boyfriend about it, assuring him and myself that it couldn’t be an std, as long as we didn’t cheat on each other, that it must be something else so lets just go get a test and be sure. I went to an urgent care center, and got a culture swab, the doc apparently not caring how painful it was, because I started to cry it hurt me so bad. He said I had to wait 7 days to find out, and that the results would be sent to my regular doc. I couldn’t wait that long.
After three days I got an appointment in to see my regular doc, by then the blister was bearable, but still painful. My doc said that there was no point in taking another test if i already did one, but she could at least look at it and tell me what she thinks. As I was spreading my legs, I asked, “So, you’ve seen what std’s look like, I mean you can probably guess what it is right?” She said maybe. As soon as she looked at my horrible lesion, I could see the disappointment in her face. She said, “well, it looks like herpes to me….sorry.”
I just sat there silent. What do I say? Your sorry? Yeah I bet you are. Then I switched to “but its possible that its not, I mean we can just wait for the test results”. She agreed that we should wait. The whole drive home I kept telling myself that the doc didn’t know what she was talking about, that logically there was no WAY that I could have herpes. It was just impossible. I had only slept with 3 people. I knew girls who had slept with 30 guys and didn’t have an std.
Well as I’m sure you can guess, 4 days later, my Doc called me, in the middle of work mind you, to tell me that the test came back positive for HSV2. Before I freaked out, I calmed myself down enough to ask her some questions about it.
“So what are my options now?”
“You take one acyclovir pill every other day for the rest of your life, if you miss one, then the herpes will come back 10 fold and you will have about 20 of those little sores” (that’s not true! – Angela)
“How do I know who I got it from?”
“Unless you have cheated on him, you got it from your boyfriend. If it was anyone before him, you would have known it by now.” (that’s not true either – Angela)
“What happens if I want to have baby now?”
“You can get inseminated by your boyfriends sperm so that you don’t have unprotected intercourse, and you will have to have a C-section” (that’s not true either, what an idiot of a doctor! – Angela)
“So I can’t have sex with my boyfriend even though he has it?”
“Not without a condom. If you don’t wear one, you will just re-infect each other over and over again, making it worse.” (again.. that’s not true! – Angela)
What else was there to say? This doctor had summed up the rest of my love life in one short sentence: It is over. I was 20 years old, had not cheated on my boyfriend, and was being told my love life was over. It was all I could do to swallow my tears and go back to finish my shift at work. I think I had to run into the bathroom to sob about 10 times until I finally got to go home.
So what did I do when I got home? I took it all out on my boyfriend, the guy who I knew gave it to me. I said horrible things to him, cried about how he ruined my life forever, and because of him I am disgusting and no one will ever want to touch me, I really let him have it. I let him have it so bad he broke down crying, saying how he just didn’t understand how he gave it to me, and that he swore he didn’t know, and didn’t cheat on me. He kept apologizing. I wasn’t listening, I was too busy screaming about what a lying, cheating, disgusting person he was.
The next day I convinced him that he needed to go to the doctor to get a prescription for it as well, so that he didn’t get any break outs. He said he didn’t understand why he needed to take medicine for it if he hasn’t even had a breakout, but went along anyway. He was showering me with gifts and crying and telling me how much he loved me and how sorry he was the whole day. I was a total b*tch to him. When we get to the doctor she said that in order for her to write a prescription she just had to test him to show positive results. We said no problem, she drew his blood, and said to wait for a letter in the mail with the results.
Five days goes by, I am up at work again. I am a little more calm about the situation, but if I think about it too much I start to cry again. I just couldn’t quit thinking, “if only I had never met him my life wouldn’t be ruined right now”. The phone rang, it was my boyfriend. He said he got the letter.
I said, “so when do you go pick up your pills?”
He said, “I guess I don’t, the letter says my test was negative.”
Silence……………I asked him to repeat what he just said, then hung up.
I felt faint. He didn’t have it? That’s impossible. There is no way. When I got home, I had never felt so bad. I expected him to be all high and mighty, and get mad at me for blaming him. I expected him to blame me. But he didn’t. He was just as loving and caring as he was before. He just acted like nothing was different. He still wanted to be with me. Crazy huh? I still can’t believe it.
Over the next few weeks, I did a lot of herpes reading, both in books and on the web, and I realized, that most of what my doctor told me was wrong. Most of what I had ever heard about herpes was wrong. The more I read the more I couldn’t believe how little facts people actually knew about herpes, and how common it is.
They say 1 in 4 people have genital herpes. They say 40% of women who have vaginal birth to children have genital herpes. This relieved and scared me. Too many people are infected and don’t know it.
It has been 4 months, and I haven’t had another outbreak yet. I am still taking it a day at a time, and am still in the acceptance stage. One day I would like to be comfortable enough to go to schools and talk to teens about stds, and give them some REAL facts. Maybe then the odds won’t be so against us.
Read more inspirational stories here
Talk about STDs here
All the comments that you see in RED throughout the story I (Angela) put those there so that people don’t freak out when they read the story. Unfortunately there are healthcare professionals that obviously have no idea what they are talking about.
Send me your story for posting
