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If you're still feeling an enormous amount of fear, as xk says, it's probably more to do with what happened during the encounter than the probability of HIV infection itself. Me, I'd be thinking of what personal demons made you need to be unsafe in the first place. Did you subconsciously want to be dangerous, or to take a risk? That can happen, and it's pretty normal. Perhaps you can find a way to take other kinds of sexual risks that don't involve the risk of HIV or STI's? And, not to make you feel worse, but thinking of your sexual partner as irresponsible is probably not going to help. You're responsible for keeping your body safe, no matter who you sleep with -- whether they're 'morally casual' or not.
HIV tests aren't a drama for me, but a couple of years ago I had a big scare. Something tiny but very weird-looking grew in a significant anatomical area, and my doctor at first thought it was a wart or herpes. My partner and I had been monogamous for two years by then, and she had a moment, I think, of suspecting me of infidelity. Or maybe I had a moment of feeling I needed to prove I hadn't been. It was awful during the waiting period, anyhow. But all the tests came back negative, and eventually the thing was diagnosed as a harmless skin-tag in a pretty odd place.
In the very distant past, I was given a curable STI. It got picked up after it had already started producing possibly-cancerous cells, and I had to have surgery. That really sucked. I never found out who had given it to me, because at that stage in my life, 'safe sex' meant not getting pregnant with lots of people. It was pretty dumb, in retrospect.
Many of the less serious claps can lurk in your system for years without symptoms, and can't be diagnosed without a proper test. And many 'respectable' heterosexual people don't think of themselves as promiscuous, so they never get tested. So, to me, it's not the 'at risk' people you have to worry about, it's those who think they would never catch the clap because they're not in a risk group. (Okay, except for IV drug users, who have to cope with drugs affecting their ability to make safe decisions and various anti-drug authorities making it hard to access clean fits.) The "I would never catch it" folk gaily practice the withdrawal method, or hope that the girl they're sleeping with is on the pill, and avoid using condoms like the plague. I have to say, I have more respect for [mostly queer] self-identified barebackers than those people. |
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