Six months ago, I sat waiting in my gynecologist’s exam room chair, fully clothed and wishing I were anywhere else. At that particular moment, I’d even have preferred being naked and spread-eagled on the paper-lined bed. It’s not true what they say about the stirrups being the worst part of the ladyparts exam room: it’s the chair. Once you’re clothed and in the chair, it means you’re there to talk.You never forget your first time debriefing with your gynecologist. Mine was four years ago, at age 22, when I sat crumpled in a chair just like this. A few days before, I’d had a rough romp of casual oral sex, a one-night head-stand. Minutes after the guy went down on me, I felt that something wasn’t right with my vagina, and two days later, I broke out in sores. “You poor thing,” the nurse practitioner at my college’s health center told me. “You have herpes.”
“Don’t I need to be tested?” I choked out between sobs. She’d cocked her head and tossed me a pity smile, as if to say, don’t you think I’ve seen enough herpes to know what it looks like?
My sores couldn’t be anything else, she told me. It didn’t matter if it was HSV-1 or HSV-2, because once it presents genitally, herpes is herpes. And it’s mine for life.
I never got another outbreak, but at 22, I still entered the dating world feeling like damaged goods. I was young, healthy, attractive, and grateful to anyone who agreed to fuck me after I told him I had herpes. (Only at first. As I wrote on this site a year and a half ago, herpes eventually helped me become a better dater and gravitate toward decent men.) But the conversation—the “before we do this, I have to tell you something” routine—never got easy. And the diagnosis inevitably warped the way I thought about myself. I no longer felt like a free agent in the world of love and sex; instead, I assumed I’d have to settle a notch or two down from the man who could have loved a herpes-free me. I may never have had another sore, but I still felt marked.
Four years after being diagnosed, I was at the gyno for my annual pap smear when I decided to order the sex-haver’s special: tests for HIV, gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis. I also figured it was time to meet my herpes, so I requested an off-menu HSV blood test that isn’t considered part of the routine STD-screening panel. “If you don’t hear from us by Wednesday, everything’s normal,” the doc told me.
And then the “we found something” call never came. That wasn’t my normal.
I called the lab to see what had happened to my test. “Oh yeah, here you are,” the lab tech told me as she pulled up my record. “You’re negative for everything.”
What.
“No,” I told the tech. “Check again. I definitely have herpes.”
“I don’t know who told you that, but you don’t,” she said. Both of my blood tests for HSV-1 and HSV-2 were negative. (...)
Follow me down the herpetic rabbit hole, which is muddied first by stigma and second by the fact that, biologically, the herpes infection is rather complicated. The other expert I spoke with, H. Hunter Handsfield, MD, is Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of Washington Center for AIDS and STD. It’s one of the hardest STDs to teach to medical students, he said, and he dedicates more time lecturing about it than almost any other infection. “It is complex for a lot of doctors out there,” he said. “A lot of practitioners don’t have the level of nuance.”
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