POZ Community Forums
Main Forums => Living With HIV => Topic started by: positivelynerd on January 15, 2013, 05:18:41 am
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I feel terrible.
I hooked up with a guy the other night. We were drunk, I topped, bareback, I came.
Even writing this makes me cringe.
I told him the next day that I was poz. He took it well. My VL is down, it was about 500 copies Dec. 20th so my hope is that I'm close to undetectable by now. I know that studies show plasma VL doesn't necessarily translate to the same reductions in genital secretion VL over the same time frame. I brought him to my ID and we got him on Truvada within roughly 32 hours. Does anyone have experiences with partners on this PEP regimen? My ID and the charge nurse think between my VL and PEP that he's in good shape but I'm so scared. I even paid the 650 bucks of what his insurance wouldn't cover.
I know sex is a two way street, but I feel like I have a greater burden of responsibility. I'm doing everything I can to make good on this.
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I feel terrible.
I hooked up with a guy the other night. We were drunk, I topped, bareback, I came.
Even writing this makes me cringe.
I told him the next day that I was poz. He took it well. My VL is down, it was about 500 copies Dec. 20th so my hope is that I'm close to undetectable by now. I know that studies show plasma VL doesn't necessarily translate to the same reductions in genital secretion VL over the same time frame. I brought him to my ID and we got him on Truvada within roughly 32 hours. Does anyone have experiences with partners on this PEP regimen? My ID and the charge nurse think between my VL and PEP that he's in good shape but I'm so scared. I even paid the 650 bucks of what his insurance wouldn't cover.
I know sex is a two way street, but I feel like I have a greater burden of responsibility. I'm doing everything I can to make good on this.
If this rather vanilla transaction happened you both deserve whatever you get. He should get HIV (providing he doesn't have it already) and you should get syphilis.
How's that for making good?
MtD
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"He took well", are you sure he's not poz too ??
I only asked coz i've never seen anyone react well to that kind of news [unless there's love involved and the person had been told before hand].
Being poz for over 15 years it's something i'm always really conscious and careful about. Even when i'm bladdered it's always there. So i never had sex with my ex girlfriends/night stands without a condom. Just the thought of infecting someone makes ill.
A moment of pleasure it's not worth the burden.
I hope everything is OK and that you learn from your experience.
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The fact you are writing this at all speaks to your conscience and sense of responsibility to your partner. Meaning, you seem to have one.
If you don't want to have this happen again, or worse, cause someone else to seroconvert, perhaps you could step back and deconstruct the evening, find out what led to your decision to bareback (setting aside your partner's need to do the same) and identify the culprit.
Booze? Drugs? Not having a condom handy? These things are fixable. Is it a fear that insisting on a condom is tacit disclosure? If that's the case, maybe some more introspection or even therapeutic assistance may be in order.
Of course, you refer to this guy as a "hook up" as well as a "partner." Might want to lock down which that is. It may well be that a hookup won't want much input or conversation with you during this time (though please refer him to AIDSMEDS' AM I INFECTED section.) A partner, or potential partner, of course, might benefit from your experience and strength during this stressful time.
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i sure hope that tail was worth 650 bucks.
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You could get a few call girls for that amount!
Sorry you made such a bad choice. You know that you messed up but at least you did the right thing in trying to make it better in every way that you can. I wish someone had done that for me after infecting me! Now you can move on and hopefully make some better choices. To er is human (trite) after all. At least you had the guts to man up to the rando and tell him the truth and help him get some treatment. hopefully everything will work out ok! Sorry you guys both ahd to go through this. :-\
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Mixing casual sex with excessive drinking is definitely to be avoided in the future. There are too many unhappy stories that come out of that mix.
You've done the best you can now in the situation. Hope PEP works for your buddy.
He should keep in mind that for a conclusive negative result he needs to test at 3 months after the completion of PEP. He can test initially at 6 weeks after completion. If he gets a negative at 6 weeks it will be a good indication he is likely to continue testing negative.
Good luck and keep us posted.
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You have my respect being honest and taking responsibility.
You went the extra mile where many/most would not.
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The most anyone ever said to me after was "here's GMHC's number, call them if you feel weird about last night" in an e-mail. ;)
Sure, it's probably better if your story hadn't happened, but your actions post-event are pretty admirable, IMHO. So, uh, what are you doing Friday night? ;) (This is a joke. No one get riled up, please. I'm not propositioning OP seriously.) You can't undo something that's been done, but you have choices about what to do next, and for what it's worth I think you made pretty good ones after the drunken questionable one.
If he "took it well", then I wouldn't beat myself up over it. Learn from it, sure, but what's done is done, and long-term guilt-induced stress is worse than saturated fats for your health. I do think we should tell people our status before having sex with them, and I agree with you that more of the responsibility falls on us - for better or for worse - than falls on naive negative people. We are more educated than they are about HIV, and with great power comes great responsibility, etc.
But for all my harping about our responsibilities as HIV+ people, some if not half of the the onus of responsibility does remain with the HIV- person to take the thirty seconds required to ask someone "are you HIV-positive?" If they don't want to "hurt your feelings" or "ruin the moment", 1) that's weirdly coy considering what's about to happen (we're talking about bareback anal sex here, I mean, really...now is not the time for coy) and 2) they can always tack on a "I don't care either way, but out of curiosity..." If he's scared and doesn't want to have sex with a positive guy, then he damned well better learn to ask the question before he has sex. And he also better use condoms anyway in that case. You won't believe this, but MEN LIE to get sex sometimes. I know. I was stunned too...
From my own experience, when I was negative with positive guys and didn't ask, they sometimes later would tell me they assumed I was already positive. Frankly so did I most of the time. One guy *really* freaked out, because had he known, he would have made different choices (ie, not slept with me). I felt bad about that, because I assumed a positive guy wouldn't care about my status, but I took away his right to choose by not revealing my own negative status. It's a pretty shitty thing to do to someone if you think about it. Being open about your status goes both ways, and just because we're positive doesn't mean we're cool with HIV transmission, right?