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I was diagnosed with HSV 2 more than three years ago. I slept with this guy who is now my husband not too long after we started dating. The sex was great and I had the I'm-in-love-life-is-great euphoria.
Until ... three days later, I woke up to go to the bathroom and peed out razor blades. I thought that I was chafed from a night of hot sex, but the pain lasted three more days until I took a little look with the mirror. I saw these white sores and a red, swollen knish (Yiddish for the female genitalia).
Somewhere in my subconscious, I knew it was herpes, but this loud, deluded voice in my head said "You are a nice Jewish girl. Nice Jewish girls don't get herpes." HaHaHaHaHa. I called my doctor and said I had a bladder infection because I was too embarrassed to say why I really needed to be seen. When I went to my appointment, I peed more razor blades into the cup, put on that nightgown thing they make you wear and sat my tokus on the crinkly paper on the examination table to wait for my doctor. She came in and said, to my utter surprise, "You have a bladder infection."
She drew a pen from her pocket and began writing a prescription for an antibiotic. I said, "wait a minute. There are these sores..." She went on to look at my holiest of holies and said that dreaded sentence: "I'm afraid you have herpes, dear." My brilliant response: "No way." I wanted to shout to her that NICE JEWISH GIRLS DON'T GET HERPES! Well, apparently, they do.
So, I rattled around through life with a tremendous depression. I took my Valtrex (I thought I would die having to hand that prescription in to the pharmacy) and the sores and pain were gone within two days. What I was left with was the feeling that my life was over, that if my boyfriend who is now my husband, and I broke up, I would be doomed. I envisioned a lonely life with my two cats and a tainted knish. My then boyfriend was devastated by the diagnosis. He had never had an outbreak and had tested negative for other STDs. He doesn't really talk about it , even though I have tried to tell him how depressed I felt.
I think it is not such a big deal to him now. He did offer me one piece of comfort, however. He said that life was too short to worry about some stupid little skin condition that it is treatable and non-life-threatening. I think he is right, and when I feel depressed about it, I try to remember his words. I am very lucky in that I haven't had an outbreak since the initial outbreak (knock on wood three times).
I hear a lot of people talking about herpes and STDS and I realize how much ignorance there is in the world and I have decided that my mission is to educate the world and take a little chunk out of the stigma surrounding STDs. I work in the mental health field and one of our clients thought that perhaps he had herpes. He was devastated and really needed the support of the staff in our program.
My co-workers would band together and talk about how disgusting it was and how they would absolutely die if they had it and how this client was stupid to have unprotected sex. I was incensed! I reminded them that about 1 in five people have herpes, that the number of people with STDs increases when you consider other diagnoses and that their discussion could very well offend someone and hurt their feelings. I didn't have the chutzpah to tell them that it was my feelings they were hurting! I then asked them if they ever had a white painful sore in their mouths. "Yeah, so what?" they said. "Well, guess what! Those sores are Herpes 1, a very close relative of genital herpes." "REALLY?" "Yup." I personally don't understand why oral herpes carries very little stigma, why we even have cute little names for it like cold sore or ulcer, when the genital kind is just plain old herpes.
I never hear anyone say, "Oh, I'm having a herpes outbreak in my mouth today." Even Dear Abby needs to get a life. This poor woman wrote to Dear Abby to say that after her husband died, she had sex with an old friend and developed genital herpes. She was in her 50's at the time and was beside herself with shame. Abby's response was "be sure to always use protection to avoid a lifetime of pain, loneliness and embarrassment." HUH? It was almost as if she were using this woman's story as a way to chastise the public and tell them "Don't wind up like this woman. Your life will be over if you wind up like this woman."
I wrote to Dear Abby to say that I felt she should have offered some words of kindness and support as well as the very obvious reminder that it is important to use condoms (which, as we know, is not a full-proof guarantee against herpes). I reminded Ms. Dear Abby that the emotional recovery from the diagnosis is harder than the physical recovery and that people will continue to avoid being open and honest with prospective partners as long as stigma exists. That was very cathartic.
I have decided that I would like to educate people and bring comfort to those out there that suffering quietly. There are so many of us out there, and my husband is right: why let a treatable, non-life threatening skin condition define our lives? I'm in school to be a nurse right now and hope that I can bring comfort and hope to other people. There is life after herpes, and even if I were single now, I feel as if any man who would reject the cool, wonderful, smart, beautiful person that is me is not worth even a second of my precious time.
Rating:  [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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