Herpes

[flexibeast]

Several years ago, when a former partner and i were at a sex party, my partner got sexually assaulted by someone. She had already told this guy "No!", quite clearly, but he still tried to enter her, sans condom, as she was going down on someone else. My partner was, naturally, rather upset by this, but too shocked and hurt to do anything other than say "Let's go". Unwisely, she and i nevertheless had sexual contact sometime during the next 24-48 hours.

A week later, we discovered we'd both contracted genital herpes.

So we got the relevant treatments and took them religiously, and the symptoms disappeared. i don't know about my former partner, but i've never had another outbreak, despite having CFS (or whatever it 'should' be called at the moment) and major depression and having gone through a series of majorly stressful events since that time. This doesn't surprise me, really, since i, like so many other people, had chickenpox - part of the herpes family - when i was a child, but haven't had any bouts of the shingles, either, again despite the above.

Now, i had been told that genital herpes could only be passed on when it was symptomatic. So i've been having a lot ofunprotected sex with naked_wrat and sacred_harlot for quite some time now, and haven't worried about them contracting it. And indeed, the most recent tests have shown that they haven't contracted it.

But last week, during a discussion on the Pleasure Activism Australia Yahoo! group, i discovered that genital herpes can be passed on even when one is not having an 'episode', via something called 'asymptomatic shedding'.

Let me put that aside for a moment.

In addition to having CFS/whatever and major depression, i have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). i've had it for several years, and certainly had it before i got herpes. It has generally manifested in two particular ways: firstly, having to check and re-check and re-re-check etc. things that i do; and secondly, a strong fear that i'm "contaminated" and that i'm going to infect the world with some terrible illness. The latter fear had subsided in recent times, such that my OCD-driven behaviours could generally look to an outside observer as being 'merely' over-fastidious.

In the last week or so - since the above online discussion - that has changed.

i'm now feeling very 'dirty', and not in the yummy sexy way. It's now clear that i can't have casual sex even with condoms and even though i'm not symptomatic, unless i first make it very clear to every potential play partner that genital herpes is lying dormant in my system somewhere, and that there is a risk that it could be contracted from me via asymptomatic shedding. Which is clearly really sexy foreplay. :-P

So i'm feeling dirty and disgusting and contagious, and that i have to avoid human interaction as much as possible. It's not a happy place to be in.
 

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[flexibeast.livejournal.com]

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