Friday, February 15, 2008
I have been married for 30 years and with the same partner. Recently I had a blister pop up but it was too late to culture. My doctor took a blood sample and told me that I was positive for HSV I and II. I also had a real bad yeast infection which I thought might have thrown this test off. My husband has tested negative for both HSV I and II. I don't understand after 30 years of marriage how I can be positive and my husband isn't. He thinks I cheated on him and I never have done anything like that.
Hi Magdalene, my name is Camilo and I am monitoring this sharepost community. I am not a healthcare practitioner and thus cannot offer you professional advice; however I can direct you to some helpful resources on our website that may answer some of your questions. First of all, it seems that your main dilemma is an issue in transmission and the possibility of it having remained dormant for 30 years since you haven't had any extramarital relations. Dr. Grayson, our community expert, has written a couple of posts that are relevant to this. In her post, What are the Symptoms of Herpes and When Should You Expect Them, she explains that once an initial outbreak occurs you may not have one for years after. In addition she also explains that there are instances where outbreaks do not elicit the typical blister pathology and can resemble other things such as jock itch. Thus according to Dr. Grayson, this suggests a couple of different scenarios. You may have not had an actual primary outbreak and remained asymptomatic for all of these years, you may have had an unnoticed primary outbreak and remained asymptomatic until now, or you may have been having very atypical mild unnoticed outbreaks for all of these years until now. Please remember that the latter are just suggestions and you should consult these possibilities with your physician before committing yourself to any of these ideas. I would also like to tell you that Dr. Grayson wrote another great article regarding what to do once your partner has been diagnosed. You can find the article here, and in this article you will find helpful suggestions such as not focusing on the origin of the infection but rather on a joint effort to keep the infection at bay and from not infecting the uninfected partner. If you still have unanswered questions the following sites may be of assistance to you also: Genital Herpes the Basics, Genital Herpes Transmission. I hope this was of help, and please feel free to continue posting in our community with any other questions you may have.
CAM
You're very welcome Magdalene. I sense a bit of confusion regarding your interpretation of the relation of jock itch to herpes referred to in Dr. Grayson;s article. If you refer to the first of Dr. Grayson's articles that I suggested, (What are the Symptoms of Herpes and When Should You Expect Them), will find that she states that a mild outbreak of herpes can be so mild that it doesn't look like a typical herpes outbreak (symptoms) and instead looks like something unrelated such as jock itch. So what that is saying is that herpes can sometimes look like jock itch, NOT that jock itch is a classical symptom of herpes. I hope this helps. If you are still confused, I suggest that you post a question directed at Dr. Grayson herself since she is a licensed healthcare practitioner and can more accurately answer your questions. In your first post you also said your husband has tested negative for HSV1 and HSV2, so unless that was a false negative, I doubt that his jock itch is related to herpes -- again, this is something that you need to address and confirm with your physician before taking it as fact. Hope this helps. Have a good day!
CAM