exposure

i had sex 2 times with a boy, once protected and once unprotected in a matter a few hours. he disclosed a few days after the fact that he has ghsv..... i went to doc and was prescribed an antiviral 3x a day for a week, the doc said in his experience, this can prevent herpes from manifesting in a painful way if i am infected. About 2 weeks after the encounter and a week after finishing the antivirals, I experienced about 5 days worth of itching down there right before my period and a little bit of itching around my anus. that all lasted maybe 5 days and is now gone i never developed any sores or had any pain peeing or pain in my legs, and i also didnt have any flu like symptoms. what do you think the chances are that i am infected from my 2 encounters? i dont know if he takes antivirals or not. he said he had one outbreak 8 months ago and thats when he found out. in total, the encounter was 6 weeks ago.

Absolutely possible you are positive...and equally as possible you are negative. I dont know for sure who exposed me but there is someone I suspect. If it was him...the only symptoms I had came about 2 weeks after we started sleeping together and it was an intense burning sensation around my vulva which went away when I took symptom relief pills for a yeast infection. I went to the doctor and they did an exam and told me I did have a yeast infection so...who knows. No mention of herpes at all. If I didnt contract it from him...then I literally had no symptoms when I was exposed. I have never had blisters, ulcers, intense itching or burning.

Moral of the story...you slept with someone with HSV. Probably wasn't the first time probably wont be the last. If I were you unless you are having real symptoms (i.e. blisters) I would not obsess over it and I would not go get tested. The most responsible thing to do in my opinion is to use condoms with all casual sex...and when you DO start a relationship and want to not use condoms...let that person know there is a chance someone exposed you and ask how they feel about that and whether they want to get tested together. The fact is herpes is so common the only way to attempt to avoid it is to be in long term monogamous relationships and for you both to get HSV tested before having any genital skin to skin contact

First of all, people with HSV are not contagious all the time but rather intermittently. Therefore, you may or may not have been exposed, let alone infected.

If he has HSV2, because he is symptomatic, and if he does not take antivirals, it is likely he is shedding virus about 20% of the time, so 1 in 5 chance he was shedding virus that day. If he takes antivirals and has HSV2, this would decrease shedding to about 6% of days, so significantly less chance he would have been shedding virus that specific day you had sex.

If he has HSV1 (which can cause genital herpes), average shedding without antivirals would be 5% of the time, so about the same as if he has HSV2 and takes antivirals. In other words, on average, he would be shedding virus 1 of every 20 days and not at all contagious the other 19 days.

If you got unlucky and happened to have sex on a day when he was shedding virus, odds of transmission are still low outside of an outbreak, but there is a possibility of infection. Studies indicate that if 100 men with HSV2 who do not take antivirals have regular unprotected sex with HSV2- negative partners over the course of a year, 10 of their partners will become infected with HSV2 by the end of the year. This drops to 5 partners if condoms are used regularly and 2 or 3 partners if both condoms and antivirals are used. Transmission risk is assumed to be lower for genital HSV1 due to less frequently shedding. So while it's possible one day of sex could result in transmission, the odds are very low.

In the future, you may want to keep in mind that the great majority of people with genital herpes don't know they have it and therefore can't disclose it to you, so if it's important to you to avoid it, you may want to make it part of your pre-sex talk to ask partners if they have recently (or ever) been tested for HSV.

Why would you recommend not going to get tested??