“Jane, you have a herpes infection.” I say the words calmly, almost casually, but not lightly. Because I know what is coming next. The eyes that fill with tears. The sheer devastation as her world crashes down around her…
Why do we let this virus do this to us?
Herpes is a virus, just like influenza and chicken pox. It doesn’t discriminate. It looks for a mucus membrane to infect, and could care less whose mucus membrane it is.
Did you know that the genital herpes virus is the very same virus that causes fever blisters? (There are two tyes of Herpes, Type I and Type II. Type I has historicaly been associated with oral herpes, and Type II with genital infections, but they can each be found in one another’s territory.)
When I tell someone they have a fever blister, they barely flinch. So why is it when I tell them they have the very same infection in the genital area, they cry?
Maybe it all goes back to the shame we feel about our genitalia. Bardiac tells us that the origin of the word “Pudenda” (Old English for female genitalia, and the name of the nerve that supplies that area) is Latin for “Shame”.
Infection of the oral mucosa. Annoyance. Same lesion, same virus, on the genital mucosa. Shame.
And blame.
When you get a cold, do you pass judgement on the person who gave it to you? Wonder what kind of friends they have or what sort of other women they have dated? Even worse, break up with them?
And yet, I’ve seen it more than once or twice – I tell the woman she has herpes, and the guy, who probably was the one who gave it to her, breaks up with her. Well, good riddance, I say. He failed the herpes test, a true measure of a relationship.
It’s starting to be more and more ridiculous, this stigma around this virus. Do you know that most newly diagnosed cases of genital herpes these days come from transmission of Type I herpes to the genital area (because no one cares about fever blisters, remember)? So now, we are now feeling shame from getting a virus we got because we didn’t care about it in the first place…
If it’s the infection itself that upsets you, let me tell you that there are great drugs that can control the genital (and oral) outbreaks, so that the infection, frankly, is little more than an occasional minor nuisance to almost everyone of my patients who has it. And please be careful about letting Big Pharma tap into your shame to sell you daily medication. Use episodic treatment, along with a little sexual prudence, and you’ll do just fine.
Just in case you think I don’t know what you herpes sufferers go through, let me tell you that I’ve had fever blisters my whole life, along with most of my brothers and sisters. We probably all got it from my mom. I feel no more ashamed of myself for having fever blisters than you should for having genital herpes. Not to mention you have an advantage in that you don’t have to worry about herpes ruining your wedding photos.
Sure, I have to be careful not to kiss my kids or have sex with my husband when I think I am getting an outbreak. And I know that, despite all my care, they may get the virus from me anyway. But that’s life (and love).
Of course, take love out of the picture, and the whole thing changes. Which is why herpes is, as I said before, a good test of a relationship. And if it causes you to only have sex with someone you really care about, and who really cares about you, well, is that such a bad thing?
So stop feeling ashamed of yourself, and get out there and find someone to love. And remember, it’s just a fever blister in a different place. Nothing more, nothing less.
Category: Second Opinions
Every advertisement on television uses the same formula:
“Your life is good. It would be perfect, except for one thing. If you could just fix that one thing, you would lead the ideal life.
And what luck! We at XYZ company have just the product you need to complete your life.”
Thus goes pharma marketing.
Sung to the Tune of an old Carol Channing standard…
“A sore on the lip can be quite unattractive
But VALTREX is a girl’s best friend…”
I swear by the stuff for cold sores and no shame here, Sister!
OMG, I need XYZ now!!!!!
I like bourbon for my canker sores (the inside the mouth ones, right)? It’s medicinal, right? Heck, if I could get laudanum…
I used to get them for finals every term from high school through college (and that’s like 12 years of college).
what is a fever blister
Annoymous:
It is a cold sore. See an image here:
http://pathmicro.med.sc.edu/virol/coldsore.jpg
But aren’t you contagiuos with gential 100% of the time and not so with fever blisters? Or am I misinformed?
Anonymous:
Afriad you have been misinformed. Both vaginal and oral herpes have highest rates of transmission during an outbreak or visible lesion, but both can also be transmitted during non-symptomatic times. Oral may have an advantage in that lesions may be more likely to be noticed (just my thought on the matter, I don’t know any hard data to support that statement, but it makes sense to me.)
A good place to get info on hereps is ASHASTD.ORG. I should have put that link up in the post, I usally try to give web resources.
hello,
your piece on herpes helps, but doesn’t really comfort. Probably because I’m brand new to the “herpetic” world. And devastated…even though I’ve not had any symptoms so far. The devastation I feel, and the tears I’m still shedding as i write these lines, obviously has more to do with the results that come up when you do a search on the stigma around herpes and the sexual/romantic future of the infected ones.
I’ve been finding most serious websites to be lacking in many ways. Their information is not elaborate, comprehensive, and satisfying enough for those of us who are newly affected. This needs to be corrected, if our physicans and obgyn’s can’t be made to be more human, more personal other than by citing me statistics, telling me to practice safe sex until i get married, and concluding by saying “it is what it is.” Suck it up girl! These kind of doctors live in the very heart of Brooklyn!.
I’m suffering much right now. This suffering caused by some numbers only (1.16) is absurd, it shouldn’t be! I should be reading my poetry books and working on my MA thesis instead of crying my heart out from this feeling of being all of a sudden less sexy, less desirable, just plain fucking LESS than I was yesterday. Contaminated!
The serious sites on the web, don’t do a serious job with addressing the scientific or highly emotional aspect of the matter. On the Planned Parenthood site, for instance, it is not made clear whether herpes is spread through skin-to-skin contact even when there are NO symptoms and the skin is NOT cut, chafed, burned, or with any rashes/sores. I quote: “Herpes is spread by touching, kissing…[etc] Brief skin-to-skin contact is all that’s needed to pass the virus[even if skin is not cut/chafed, etc?]” Further down: “Skin can be infected if it is cut, chafed, or burned, or has a rash or other sores.” Confused!
My other confusion is something that was addressed in your post, but very briefly, and which I wanted to know more about. What does it mean that “type I has historically been associated with oral herpes, and Type II with genital infections?” Is there a chemical/constitutional difference between type I and type II–which is what I’ve been thinking–or is it called type II when it is identified visibly in the genital area? As someone with no symptoms (so far, and it’s been at least over three months), is it possible that my blood tests identify a type II that may have affected my mouth? This question leads me to many others such as: if type II is contagious even when dormant, does that mean every act of kissing (blessing) someone can turn into a curse?
Finally I don’t understand why type II is written about as being highly contagious, but type I is not. Is just because more people have type I, because it’s in the mouth and lips, and no one can hide it, and therefore there is no stigma about it?
Ah the blessings of culture, of clothes, of science, and its labyrinthine nature and its future of total unknowing and helplessness…from too much knowing…and too little time. To care! to mend the hearts it stabs with its high tech labs and accurated tests!
thanks!
-An emotional wreck!
Hi,
I just love this post. If there was more information on the disease that’s out there, it wouldn’t be so devastating when you are officially diagnosed(as I was, in November 2008). It’s not cancer, but while there is no cure, it doesn’t mean you have to stop living. I’d like to repost this on my blog at Cure for Herpes. It’s something I started that is partly something like a research paper as I continue to study the disease and a journal of what I am going through.
Thanks,
Kristina
Kristina –
Feel free to link to/comment on/write about/briefly excerpt with credit on your blog, but you cannot repost my post, as it is my content.
Thanks so much for reading.
Thank you for this post!
I've had H for about 7 years now, got it from an ex after a post-breakup booty call. As a single woman in my mid-thirties, it was horrifying to consider having "the talk" before having sex for the rest of my life. It's still not the easiest thing to do, but the majority of men I've been with have been pretty undisturbed by it, and we've gone onto lots of great sex. And not one has caught it from me, even the long-term, monogomous, unprotected ones.
It still never fails to annoy me, though, that I have to have the talk, while those lucky oral herpes carriers get to kiss all they want as long as they're symptom free.
Could you clarify something for me? If someone has never had symptoms of herpes, yet when they get the blood test are found to have the antibody for HSV2, do they actually have herpes? Are they a "carrier"? Or have they just been "exposed" and are not a risk to anyone. This is a very confusing point in all the literature, and it seems to me a lot of people on various sharing sites get really freaked out about having the antibody when they've never even had a single sore and might never.
Thank you for this post.
Anonymous – If a person has positive antibodies for herpes, he or she has been exposed and indeed may have had herpes and be infectious to others. Infectivity depends on if a person is shedding virus, and this occurs at unpredictable times and levels. SOme folks never have a symptomatic ourbreak, or have such mild symptoms that they do not recognize it as herpes. I've diagnosed herpes in women as old as their 70's, presumably a secondary or recurrent outbreak, and in retrospect theyr ealize that certain recurrent syptms they've been ignoring for years were probably outbreaks.
Hope this info helps. Thanks for reading.
Wow, it would be great if there were a home test for whether one is shedding. Problem solved.
Im fed up with hearing of ways to manage living with herpes, usually authored by people who do not have it. Especially being told that ‘honesty is always the best policy’ Lerts examine that one shall we?
You date a girl in a normal fashion then the time comes to go to bed, then the awkard little talk…she admires your honesty and agrees that with a little precaution things will be just fine. Weeks later… the relationship isnt going so well, and it ends badly. Later down the track… you meet someone else. The old date you had a bad break up with dosent take to kindly to the idea that you might have a shot at happiness with someone else…. Im sure by now you see where this is going… and it DOES HAPPEN!!! FYI… if you discover you have the virus DO NOT even tell your best friend, the same thing can happen and it has happened to me.
So what do we do? Join support groups of mostly people in their late 40s and above who are not very attractive, herpes dating websites and other means of shallowing our dating pool and forging relationships with people who the only thing you have in common with is a mild skin infection. All of this social distress and depravation over a coldsore on your johnson that if youre very unluck you might see only 3 times a year? Pffft!
If we’re really serious about the destigmatisation of HSV2 I think it is quite simple- ABOLISH TESTING. Lets treat it like type 1…. nobody goes for a blood test or warns anyone they have it and it is not notifiable by law and neither is type 2. I have HSV2 and have had for a very long time, though Ive only just discovered that I have it. And I tell you in all honesty that it never was a problem for me until I knew that I was infected.
Anonymous –
Your story is a perfect example of how the misplaced shame and stigma we place on oral vs genital herpes is just plain ridiculous. Thank you for sharing it here.
You know what we need? A herpes vaccine.
Thanks for this. I wish it wasn’t a blog post, but published in some kind of “medical journal” because telling your partner in this ridiculous, stigmatized society is really difficult without “medical proof”. When I go to a new OB/GYN they literally cringe when I tell them I have sex with multiple partners (with condoms, while taking acyclovir and L Lysine, taking care of myself, and seeing an infection once a year that’s a hell of lot less severe than half of the ones I see on my coworkers’ mouths during cold season.)
Why does the medical community cringe at a non-lethal, medically inconsequential inconvenience that is centuries, indeed, millenniums, old, which affects a fraction of the population that HPV does, and HPV actually has been proven to cause cervical cancer? When I was growing up, HPV’s stigma was on par with Herpes. We were forced to watch videos in school warning us of the horrible consequences of sex, including warts that prevented penetration from occurring and multiple cold sores that debilitated us for weeks on end, year after year, forever.
Suddenly, when it was found that HPV was actually life threatening, it was OK to have it. We found a vaccine (amazing! We put a man on the moon in 69 and discovered penicillin long before, and thank goodness that we found a vaccine for HPV right after we discovered it was life threatening) -and then it was OK to have it. “Well, most people do have HPV, so make sure you get tested and get regular check-ups, if you don’t have it, get the vaccine, it’s not a big deal” became the word.
So what about herpes? It’s not going to happen. Not until it becomes life threatening will herpes be an OK affect to have. I applaud you as a medical professional for calling out what I try to tell partners- that the HSV infection I have which occurs approximately 2-3 times a year, for 1-2 days, on my outer left labia, is akin to a zit I had on my forehead in 8th grade. But without medical backup, they think I’m just trying to pull one over. And while I agree that if it’s love, they’ll understand, the reality is that in the 21st century dating world, people don’t see it that way.
We all have trust issues. I don’t judge the man I fell madly in love with over the last month for cooling off. He’s not a scientist. Christ, one of my good friends, a doctor in an OB/GYN practice, has made herpes stigmatizing remarks in my presence. She of course has no idea that I am a long-positive person. I have to quietly eat it. And how did I get it? I was in love, and knew that the stigma was a load of BS because I did my own research, with a critical mind, and learned of the anti-viral trial tests in the 1970s and 1980s, as a reaction to the sexual revolution.
Please, can you and your colleagues post in medical journals so we have something sane to show our potential partners? The information age needs it. Myself and a good female friend are quickly looking at the reality of not having children because of this stigma.
Thanks.
I completely and totally agree with the post above. I also was infected with Herpes type II just over two years ago, and I believe dealing with the stigma was ten times more challenging than dealing with the disease itself. My advice, difficult as it can sound, is to actively do something about it amongst your friends and communities. For me, sharing my experience with as many trusting and loving friends as possible has been what it takes to reduce and eliminate the effects of this cruel social stigma. Because people like the above author’s OB/GYN supervisor won’t know to stop the jokes or prejudiced comments until they themselves have had an opportunity to empathize with someone affected, and face the less-than-harsh reality of the infection.
I have had multiple circumstances where telling a friend has lead to their own disclosure of a different close friend also having Herpes. In a couple cases, I have gotten to chat with these folks and create some opportunity for support, and just plain offer a reality check: “It’s not that bad, is it? You’re not alone!”
I say take matters into your own hands to work towards destigmatization of this benign skin infection.
**Correction, the OB/GYN was not a supervisor, but a friend! I encourage this person to call the friend out! Tell them you have Herpes! You would be amazed how empowered you may feel as well as how effectively this may change your friend’s attitude towards Herpes.