I Have Herpes, part trois

It's been just over four months since I first found out I have HSV-1 on my genitals. It's looking up. Considering where I started with this, it's looking way, way up. I think, in part, I owe a thank-you a crappy doctor, and even, maybe, to the virus itself. Positivity and activism start in the weirdest places. Here's that story.

Shortly after getting my results from Zoomcare, I made an appointment with my regular doctor to go talk to her about what I could do, what kind of meds I could take, and how (after being tested so many times over the course of the previous months) I could possibly be positive. My regular doctor is great; she owns and operates her own clinic in North Portland, is very naturopath/alternative medicine friendly. She believes in quality of patient care, and usually allots double the appointment time per patient as most doctors. She takes her time, she's sex-positive and friendly.

But my regular doctor was on vacation, and another Nurse Practitioner was covering her appointments. It was the same clinic, so although I wasn't as comforted by the idea of seeing a new doctor, I was fairly sure she'd be as supportive, as sex-positive, etc., as the woman who hired her.

I was kind of wrong. A few minutes into the appointment, the first hints of this appeared. I'd done a bunch of research by then, but like all medical research (even the stuff in hold-in-you-hand-books), I wanted the same answers from an actual physician. I asked her if she had any idea where I'd gotten it, any idea about the differences between types (at the time, I didn't know which type I had), any idea about how to proceed from here.

She asked me, of course, if there's a chance my partner had slept with someone else. Under the circumstances, it was a reasonable question. After I told her "no," she kept pushing, kept telling me that was the most likely way I could have contracted the disease. I asked her if there were other ways, and she answered, pretty simply "I don't know."

And that stayed her answer for just about everything.

"What's the difference between type 1 and type 2, practically, for my life?" 

"I mean, we don't really know that. Probably not much."

That is, very simply, an incorrect answer. But I understand physicians probably feel some pressure to have answers, and when they don't, chalking the lack of knowledge up to the medical establishment at large is understandable.

Wait. No, it's not. This is my sexual health. This is my health health. If you don't know the answer, then tell me that. Or, better yet, go ask a colleague in the office. That's what happened when I went back, after the visit, and that's when I got a really awesome pamphlet that they had hanging on the back of the door that basically answered all my questions. Just ask. I'll wait. Happily, because I really, really wanted all the information I could get.

Up until that point, I felt like she was sort of ill-informed, but I wasn't mad or seriously put off. I was disappointed  but not angry. Up until now, although she hadn't helped me much, she hadn't done anything egregious.

Then I asked her about suppressive medications.

"So, I have a partner, he's negative, we're staying together. I'm wondering what I can do about suppressive meds." I'm tearing up a little at this point, hands in my lap, perched on the paper-covered exam table, because it's pretty touching to me that Sir* is staying, how supportive he's been, how loved I feel, etc. 

"Well, I'm not sure they'll do much." 

"But, I've been with people before who were positive, and they took suppressive meds partly to lessen my risk, and..." I'm tearing up, and I apologize for it (because I was taught to apologize for being emotional, always), and I take a tissue from her. 

"You might want to wait to make this decision when you're a little less emotional."

*He really needs a different name here, one that isn't so kink-related, for when I'm talking about non-kinky things, but when I don't want to refer to him as "my partner" all the time.


And that, right there, is where I sort of wrote her off. That's where the apologies stopped, because fuck you doctor lady, damn right I'm emotional. We bantered back and forth about medication for a while, her saying I should really think about what I put in my body, my saying that the sexual health of my partner and my comfort in my own body were really important to me, etc. etc. Eventually, I sort of straight up told her "Hey, I want a prescription for suppressive meds. Are you going to give me one or not?" At which point she wrote me one, and walked out.

The amount of shame I felt in that moment, having to pry this thing out of her was... staggering. I felt like a prostitute in confessional; I felt like everything, everything was my fault, like I wasn't handling things well, like I was being a child about all of it. I kept asking, kept sticking to what I knew I wanted, but there are few times in my life I can remember when it was so hard.

I don't know when we started discounting emotion so much in society, especially for women. But I lead a rich, highly informative, very intelligent emotional life. My emotions are really important to me. They're how I connect with other people. And even if they weren't - even if I was some über-logical machine (as the redditors would have us believe is the paradigm of debate) - that is not a reason to doubt my adult decision making capabilities.

Sir picked me up after the appointment, and I cried about it some more. I'm really good at crying, and I think most of the time, it's really good for me. But I also felt something else. A small and almost undetectable rage brewing at the bottom of the crying. An indignation, tiny and dwarfed by how much shame I felt about my own body, but an indignation just the same. A part of me that thought: yes, you can do something about this, no, you should not have to feel this way, yes, there is a place for positive change in this new disease. Yes, you should do something about this. Something needs to be done, and lucky you, you get to be the one to do some of the something.

So, since then, I've made a few small changes. I asked my co-worker to stop making herpes jokes during our pre-set (he didn't ask me to explain, and I didn't offer, but he did stop). I display my herpes books right next to my kink books and sex-positive books. These are worlds that interact, for me, and pretending like they don't doesn't do any good.

I'm open and honest about the fact that I have herpes. It even came up in the shower (we were talking about STD scares), with a few friends at the hippie festival (it was a non-sexual situation. Hippies just tend to... get naked together at any opportunity). They seemed a little weirded out at first, but I answered some questions, and explained, and by the end, we were joking and discussing it openly.

Other than that, and the blog posts, I haven't done anything super-activisty about it. But I'd like to.

I think it's important to talk about it, and I think how powerful talking (or not talking) can be is often supremely underrated. This became especially apparent when Sir pointed out, a few months in, that I never said the word out loud. That I always said "this thing," or "an STD." And if Harry Potter taught me anything, it's that avoiding a word gives it all that much more power, usually undeserved and destructive. So now I say it all the time.

Herpes. Herpes herpes herpes herpes. Herpes!

Oh, and that NP who I saw? I asked, last time I was in, if they had any review forms for patient experiences with other doctors at the clinic. My regular doctor turned to me, and in response, said: "Oh, [NP]? Yeah, she's no longer with us."