Nice Jewish Girls don't get herpes

Before I tell you about my odyssey with genital herpes, I want to tell you who I am.  I want to do so as a reminder to everyone (myself included) living with an STD that you are more than your STD. My name is Holly and I am 33. I work in the mental health field, have a master's degree in psychology and I am attending school now for nursing. I am funny, athletic, sensitive, a slob, a cat lover, a wife, really really intelligent, depressed, ambitious - I could go on. I am all these things and I have HSV 2.

I was diagnosed with genital herpes almost four years ago. I had just gotten out of a relationship and hooked up with this guy whom I met at work. I had had a sizeable crush on this man for a long time. It was a warm, spring evening and I was feeling romantic. We hung around and talked for two hours and then had unprotected sex.

At the time, I was working on two fallacies: #1 Nice Jewish girls like me don't get STDS #2 He said he was clean and thus this true without a doubt. WRONG!!!!

Two days after some really delicious sex, my knish (Yiddish for vagina) felt very sore. I attributed this feeling to chafing from sex. I also had a voluminous amount of discharge and, somewhere in my mind, I knew something was wrong. I took my little self into the bathroom with a mirror and took a look. I had two white sores with slits and one very swollen knish. My mind worked furiously to come up with an explanation for what I saw and these explanations didn't include what I knew in my heart to be true -- I had contracted herpes. I was insatiably tired and felt sick and achy all over.

I called my doctor and told them I needed an appointment for a bladder infection (one of my creative little explanations for what ailed me). I was way too embarrassed to tell them that I thought I had an STD. On the day of my appointment, I peed in the cup, put on that annoying smock thing they make you wear and sat my bare behind on the crinkly paper to wait for the nurse practitioner. She came into the room and said "you have a bladder infection" while she whipped out her prescription pad.

"Wait," I said in this tiny voice. "There's more..."

I put my feet in the stirrups and the nurse practitioner flicked on that light. I was wearing these cute socks with cats on them, and focused on them as she hemmed and hawed at my genitals.

She knocked me over the head with a frying pan: "You have genital herpes," she said. "No I don't,"  I said, as if this would change reality. I mean, come on. Nice Jewish girls don't get herpes.

"I'm afraid you do, dear," she said. She held a mirror up to my knish and showed me the sores I had seen several days ago. She took a swab of one of the sores for testing and this was the most painful g-d thing I have ever experienced. I have to admit I came out with some unlady-like words, but what the hell, I had herpes and it didn't matter if I was polite. She sent me on my way with a prescription for Valtrex and some kind words about how I wasn't alone -- not by a long shot.

What a shock -- a week later the test came back positive for HSV 2.

I told the man who gave it me, and he was so upset. He had had no idea he had herpes. He had never had an outbreak and had been tested for other STDS before. He let me cry all over him -- I think I even blew my nose on his shirt at one point -- and listened to my self-pity all night.

"I want to die," I told him.

"I can't see life ever being normal again," I told him. I really couldn't see how life could possibly continue now that I had herpes. He told me that my life would continue, that I was still the same person with or without herpes and that he hoped I didn't go off and do something dumb like kill myself.

Well, here I am -- I am still here, and I am stronger than I ever was, even before contracting herpes. I confided in a friend once, and she said "Oh, that's no big deal, I have it, too." I go through times where I feel totally alone and sad about having a life-long STD and that is why I belong to the PUP group and why I am writing my story. It just makes me feel better. And, truth be told, having herpes really hasn't been a huge deal, physically. I am very lucky in that I haven't had any outbreaks since my initial outbreak. I do acknowledge that it could happen someday and I used to live in fear of this possibility. However, I have better things to do than worry about it. Medication can take care of the outbreaks -- Valtrex worked very well for me.

Life goes on. It really does. I married Phil, the guy who gave me the herpes. He is the best thing that ever happened to me, and I think that the love I found in him made everything worthwhile. I have a full life with working at a group home for men with mental illness, going to school and teaching step aerobics at my gym. Since I have gone back to school, I have even discovered that I am good at science and now I am entertaining the idea of going to med school. And guess what my specialty would be? Infectious diseases, of course.

My mission now is to chip away at the stigma and misinformation people have regarding STDS and to bring comfort to people who have been diagnosed with STDS. We are far from alone, and God knows, I think people with STDS outnumber people without them. Please, stay strong and confident and remember who you are. - Holly

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