Diosa, did you have the actual lesion tested via a scrape thingie?
I’m quite sure that I know some people with herpes, but I’m equally sure that they would never tell me about it, whoever they are.
One, but not personally. It was the ex-wife of a guy I was dating. Things were rolling along relationship-wise, and he sensed that we might be more intimate in the future, so he felt like he should tell me. He was not a known carrier, but the reality was there was some risk which he thought I should know about beforehand.
The thing was, I wasn’t prepared for it and couldn’t wrap my mind around what he’d just said.
I was like, “Huh? Your ex-wife had HER PIECE? Her piece of what?” Like the big clueless moron I was.
Which led to him half-bellowing “No, HERPES. HERPES!!” like you’d yell to a hard-of-hearing person. Which was quite a big change from the soft, hesitant, careful way he’d first crafted the confession. It was funny in a macabre way.
I’m sure I know other people with herpes without knowing that I know them.
He dumped her because she had it. As I said, the story is much abbreviated but that was just one item in a very, very long list of nastiness that comprised him
She was far better off without him although it took a long time to realize that.
Yeah. Long story short, I woke up one morning with the world’s ugliest looking patch on my leg- like, it was puffy, reddish purple, very icky. My roommate had MRSA about a month before that, so I immediately flipped out, made an appointment with the doctor (though they couldn’t see me for a few days), AND walked into the student health center at school. The doctor at the student health center said it wasn’t MRSA because it wasn’t symmetrical, he had no idea what it was, but I should try to spray some Lotramin on it :eek:. I did, which burned like hell. Icky.
Anyway, then two days later I went to my regular doctor who walked by my exposed leg, said, “Oh, someone’s got shingles.” I had only heard of shingles as like, an old people disease that attacks your heart and stuff, so I started freaking out. He calmed me down and said (after explaining shingles likely wasn’t going to kill me or anything), “I might be wrong, but let’s check.” He went through the little checklist, brought out a little body map on the computer that had what I guess are nerve groupings on it (like, it was the body with big circles where each nerve group goes or something) and lo and behold! My shingles were all contained on one side, in one single little nerve area. Then we did the scraping just to be sure, which confirmed everything.
So, the shingles cleared up after a week or so, but then I found a cyst on my outer hip. I went to the doctor and I also had MRSA, so shingles was probably just my body flippin’ out over a MRSA and b finals week at school (of course this all coincided).
(Funny enough, I called my mom to tell her I had shingles. She said, “Oh, yeah, when you were a kid I got you chicken pox on purpose so you wouldn’t get it when you’re older!” Me: "Well, that plan worked swimmingly, didn’t it, mother? :dubious: 
).
I only “know” (FOAFOAFOAF sorta thing) one person that for sure has herpes. I do know someone with genital warts, though.
As for the AIDS question, 2 of my neighbors have it (I live in a gay-operated building, my neighbors are all gay men). Don’t think I know any others, although my friend’s roommate’s boyfriend died from it, but I hadn’t met the guy.
Well, I don’t know, then. All I have to go on is what the doctor who treated me told me.
However it came about, I’m extremely grateful that I don’t get frequent or bad outbreaks (except for that first outbreak of oral lesions; and I’m sure that would never have gotten as bad as it was, except: my husband’s brother had died recently, his father had two heart attacks, my own mother was terminally ill and I was her primary caregiver; since my mother was ill, I’d taken over all of her household chores as well; we had a toddler; I was planning our wedding. Whew! I’m tired just thinking about it all! No wonder I was so stressed!)
One of my best friend’s boyfriend has it. Don’t know of anyone else with it.
God, MRSA is everywhere, isn’t it? I have a friend who is just getting over an ear infection caused by community-acquired MRSA and her husband now has it in his nose, with excruciatingly painful pustules. It’s like the friggin plague. They are practically boiling themselves to keep their pre-schooler from getting it.
Both my hub and I have herpes, and I know a lot of people who have it. I just pretty much assume a good proportion of people have it and don’t realize it because you can overlook the symptoms of infection so easily. It’s not like people are constantly walking around with weeping sores.
Yeah, we’re actually not sure where the MRSA originally came from. We’re both in college, so maybe we picked it up there. Roomie worked at Border’s, so she was always around sick people, touching sick people, and touching things sick people touched. Roomie’s mom is also an ER nurse, so maybe she picked it up from Mom.
I’m not sure if your friends were told, but they should pick up some Hibiclense (like this, though mine was in a blue bottle - you can get for as cheap as $4 for a bottle at some pharmacies) and wash with it all the time, particularly over their MRSA areas. Actually, now that I don’t (I hope!) have MRSA anymore, I still keep Hibiclense around. Any time I get some razor burn or even a break out on my face, a little wash with the Hibiclense clears things up nicely. Oh, the doctor also gave me. . . I think it was Bactriban (someone in the know can correct me if I’m wrong). It’s a little tube of gel to put on their MRSA sites (and in the nose and under their nails, where the MRSA hangs out).
I also spent about a million dollars on Lysol air spray, Lysol counter spray, Lysol wipes, and bleach 
. All good investments heh.
I have herpes - both HSV I and II.
I contracted it a little over a year ago when I took a casual sex partner. We had the talk. I asked him if he’d been tested, and he said yes, and all the tests were clean. I still insisted on using a condom, even though I was also on the Pill. He showed no symptoms at all.
Ten days after our first evening o’ fun, I got what I thought was a very angry pimple on the outside of my vulva. I put a hot compress on it, and it went nuclear. I called my doctor, and was told to come in. She put me on Valtrex even before the test results were back. I had what she called a “severe primary outbreak”. Only one lesion, but I had the classic flu symptoms and neuralgia down my left leg. I was in so much pain from the lesion and the neuralgia - anything from random “electric shocks” to feeling like someone was pushing a red, hot needle into my big toe to feeling like I had road rash over half my leg - that my doc put me on Vicadin so I could make it through the work day.
Over the last year, my immune system has gotten a grip on things, and I haven’t experienced any further lesions, though I do sometimes get the swollen glands and neuralgia that can come with it.
This is why I’ve gotten all evangelistic when the topic of sex comes up.
People lie, or they simply don’t know. Condoms don’t necessarily protect. Herpes can be passed when there are no symptoms at all. From here on out, any time I consider taking a new lover, I have to explain to him what his risks are. I absolutely will not do to another person what my last lover did to me. Aside from the stigma, there is the physical pain caused by this virus, and there is the knowledge that any man who wants a sexual relationship with me has to be willing to share that risk. Cuts down the pool of available men fairly steeply.
Thankfully, my doctor, my pharmacist, and those friends I have told have all been incredibly supportive. I know of one other person who has herpes. His wife told me, with his permission, when I cried on her shoulder over the whole thing. I’m sure there are many, many others who have it, and that about half of those who have it don’t know. That’s the way it goes.
The daughter of a friend of mine has it.
This is just an anecdote, so I am not saying this is universal, but… She went to an upper middle class High School where status and looking rich was everything (think OC, but not with that kind of wealth). The girls grew up on Britney Spears and idolized Paris Hilton and her ilk. They went to every dance in a limo, with $300 dresses and hair and makeup professionally done, and casual sex afterwards was common. Genital herpes was rampant in this crowd.
I live in a similar community in terms of wealth, but the kids here wear REI and Timberline and Merrill, Hollister and Jimmy Choo, not so much. A girl would get ridiculed for bringing a precious handbag to school. Herpes isn’t a big issue here - I’ve never gotten an alert from school in the mail, which were common in my friends experience (Northern Virginia).
I know about seven people that have it, different ages, different walks of life, most of them had the initial outbreak then nothing.
I understand that it’s not curable, but in the grand scheme of things it’s not a death sentence.
Well, nearly every openly gay man I knew prior to 1987 is dead, so the math works a bit differently in my circle of friends.
Prior to 1987 I was, well, one year old, so I certainly don’t have any frame of reference in that regard. I suppose that, like herpes, it stands out to me because it is a disease that is supposed to be ravaging my generation. While I have no doubt that there are tons of folks that don’t know or are hiding it, it just seems that I’d know someone, you know? The statistics say that I’ll know a few people by the time I die, so I’m sure this will all change, but yeah.
Well my good friend in high school got it from her boyfriend. That’s two. My best friend got it when she was about 17, from her boyfriend. That’s four. Later her girlfriend got it. Five. My roommate in my freshman year of college got it. Six. So when I got it when I was about 21, I knew exactly what it was, going to the doctor was a formality. I am pretty sure I know who I got it from, which makes seven and eight. My best friend has another good friend who has it and who gave it to her daughter when she was born. That makes ten. Maybe people just feel safe confiding in me?
I feel lucky in a way that I knew so many people who had it, because when I got it, I really dealt with it a LOT better than most people. I knew that life goes on and it’s not the end of the world. Of course I was lucky too in that I got an extremely mild case and never had any sores on my face or anything like that. I don’t take medicine for it, though I did for a while (the first few years were the worst in terms of outbreaks severity and frequency). I did have to change my lifestyle fairly radically - stress was my main cause of outbreaks. It has nopw been years since I had one. As far as I know I have never given Herpes to anyone, which I am pretty happy about. And I have told every partner I’ve had since I got it, with one stupid exception (a drunken threesome) and if the two guys involved hadn’t ended up being total assholes I might feel worse about it. But overall I hold my head up and don’t feel ashamed about it. I wish I could help other people with herpes to feel the same way. I think really the worst thing about getting herpes is the terrible blow to your self-esteem.
This is probably a dumb question and I don’t meant it to be rude at all- I’m genuinely curious (please don’t take offense at my stupid 
). My understanding is that if you have herpes, you are absolutely, positively not supposed to give birth vaginally because of the very reason you described. If I recall, the herpes can blind the baby, among other things. Is this correct?
So, if the doctors knew friend’s friend had herpes, why would they have her deliver vaginally? Obviously, that’s a private thing between her doctor and herself, but I’m just curious what their rationale would be. Or can herpes be transferred through blood or breastmilk, so maybe she did get a csection but the baby got it some other way?
I don’t know the details, sorry.
ETA: Her daughter is 16 or 17 years old now, I don’t know if they were doing C-section births exclusively at the time? Also, she may have given it to her simply by kissing her when she had a cold sore or changing her diapers with virus on her hands?
I know nobody who has told me about having herpes.
Also, I originally read this thread’s title as “How many people know you have genital herpes?”, and I was a bit surprised that there were 37 replies.
As an aside, at one point in time, I had a regular ol’ skin wart on my hand that I was trying to eradicate that required prescription cream; unfortunately, not only was the cream SUPER EXPENSIVE (over $300/box without the prescription), but it was also most commonly used to treat genital warts. I got some :dubious: :rolleyes: :eek: at me initially when I asked what it was for that it’d cost so much.
I think that my peer group does skew me heavily toward the “not likely to have an STI” crowd. One of my best friends did the “sexual health” chats with the health center on campus while we were in college, and most of my other friends were also reasonably acquainted with him if not close friends. We all knew what to do, were all pretty responsible about being protected against disease and pregnancy, and none of us were big on sleeping around without protection. I think I only know one person who has it, but they are a parent of a friend and I don’t know much about the background of it, other than it might’ve been similar to Norinew’s situation.