The False Alarm

During my first semester as a full-time college student, I had to go to the clinic. I wasn't feeling well. I was beginning to worry that something was wrong. Really, really wrong.


I was in a new relationship. I guess I had pregnancy and STDs and that sort of thing on my mind a lot. Not that I was having sex with him yet, but we were talking about it. Or, at least, what were doing at the time did not meet my definition of having sex. We weren't "doing it", but we were getting pretty damn close.


I'd only "done it" with one person, and at the time that was the last person in the world that I wanted to talk to. But I'm sitting there in the clinic, thinking of how I was going to have to tell my new boyfriend that we could never have sex. And I was thinking that I would have to go and talk to this ex-boyfriend and tell him what was going on so that he could warn his ex-girlfriend and his current girlfriend and anyone else who needed to know. I really did not want to talk to him, but of course I would find the courage to do the right thing. I figured if I did have something he would know before I did, but I would have to be sure and tell him just in case he didn't know.


At the time I knew very little about STDs and such. I suppose I don't know that much about the subject now, but at the time I had the idea that if you caught an STD you would know about it within three months, even if you didn't have any lab work done. At the time the only thing that I knew of that a person could have for a year or more without showing symptoms was AIDS.


So I'm sitting in the clinic, and I just know that I have AIDS.


Somehow with all of these thoughts about doing the right thing and being an adult, I kept worrying about my mother finding out. Tell my boyfriend, sure. Tell me ex-boyfriend, sure. Tell my mom, not today.


So I'm sitting there trying to think of how I'm going to find the ex-boyfriend, how he might be married and living in his own house by now, how I would have to get his new address from his mom, and all that sort of thing. And then the nurse comes to get me and I tell her my symptoms. And I stress that I haven't been with anyone that way in over a year and I haven't had a rash or anything so it probably isn't anything that a shot of antibiotics is going to fix. And she asks me a few questions, and some of them don't seem to have anything to do with anything but I answer them anyway.


And I'm pretty much crying at that point, but I ask for an AIDS test.


She tells me that she can arrange for an AIDS test if I really want one, but she doesn't think that I'll need it.


She says that what I had described was a yeast infection.


I was so relieved. I cried some more. She said that she didn't have any medication for me, but that if I would just call the doctor who had recently given me the antibiotics that had caused me to get the yeast infection he would probably give me a prescription without even going in for an exam.


Relieved as I was, I still worried about what my mother would think. The nurse called my mom and told her what the problem was, but I still worried that my mom thought I had an STD. If my mom thought I had an STD, she would figure out that I'd had sex, and then my life would be over.


So that was my one experience of having to tell a sex partner that he needed to go an have a test for STDs. It only got as far as having a conversation in my head. But of course I would have had the conversation for real if it had been necessary. I can't understand why a person would be so evil as to not tell their sex partners that they've been exposed to an STD. But now that I'm out blogging and such I'm finding out that people don't even try to do the right thing. And I just don't understand why other people would think that is acceptable.