So depressed

[Franca1]

I am so depressed. Diagnosed on Thursday although the urine culture is not back yet. Logically I know there is support and that I will be ok sometime (?) in the future. But it took my entire life to feel as good about myself as I have been feeling for the past two years. And only this year did I feel that anyone could actually be attracted to me. I am 48. I have worked so hard to get here and it feels like it's all for nothing. I don't know if my recent partner infected me or if I was already exposed. Either way I feel that I did this to myself by my choices and nothing will change that. I don't know how I'm going to go to work tomorrow. I work all day tomorrow. I already missed a day and can't get paid if I don't work. I need this work very much, I'm already missing hours due to the holidays. I feel like all the dreams I have finally permitted myself to have are just a bunch of shit. Now I have another expense that I can't afford Now I'm reading about people suing each other for exposing them to this and I'm having panic attacks. I don't know what to do next.

[MMissouri]

The older we get the more likely we are to have herpes. Don't feel alone in that because you're more likely to find other people with a positive status in your age group. I don't have the numbers on it, but someone will surely pop up with that information soon.

 

Go to work. Keep dreaming. Nothing will really change in your life other than the fact that you might have to have what could possibly be an uncomfortable conversation with potential partners. It's not an additional expense really. You can take antivirals if you wish, but it's not something you have to do. You can get l-lysine if you'd like. It really depends on your outbreaks and what you are comfortable with. Try not to get ahead of yourself with possible bad things that could happen, bad things happen all the time, it's how you choose to deal with them that will impact how they affect you.

 

What do you do next? Learn as much as you can and talk as much as you need to. It's an adjustment, but the more you know, the less it seems.

 

Welcome to the forum.

[ihaveittoo]

MMissouri is right about learning as much as you can. Adrials videos are very good. The eBook and handouts are good. This blog http://supporttruthanddialog.com/ is a very good read too.

 

Good luck to you!

[optimist]

@Franca1 I'm so sorry you're going through this. As @MMissouri said, genital herpes becomes more and more common as we age. For instance, in the U.S., if you are a 48 year old single woman, you will discover far more than half of your female peers have genital herpes, including roughly half with HSV2 specifically. However, most are unaware they are infected.

 

While the choices we make can influence our level of risk, avoiding genital herpes completely requires either a lifetime of celibacy or strict adherence to testing with partners who are equally committed to remaining free of HSV, as well as a willingness to avoid sexual contact with most adults as most have HSV of one type or another, either of which can be transmitted to the genitals. Therefore, I hope you can be gentle with yourself in regard to your past choices and your diagnosis.

[HikingGirl]

@Franca1 Welome to the forums. I hope you'll find them as helpful as I have. You're diagnosis is so new. It's completely normal to feel depressed. I bounced around the five stages of grief for several months. I got a new boss just a month before my diagnosis and he must have thought I was nuts because I was an emotional rollercoaster. I had planned to go back to work after my diagnosis one afternoon, and had to call him crying and ask to go home because I had bad news at the doctor's office. It was so embarrassing. He probably thought I had cancer!! LOL. Please give yourself permission to grieve. Grief was really scary for me because I felt like it would never end and I didn't want to enter a never-ending nightmare, but feeling everything associated with grief really helped me to move forward.

 

(FWIW, after I divorced, the book "How to Survive the Loss of a Love" by Peter McWilliams was a godsend. I picked it up again after my diagnosis nearly a year ago and was pleasantly surprised by how well it applied to any situation involving grief. Anything by Brene Brown--a shame researcher and professor of social work--is also wonderful.)

 

To echo what others have said, now is the time to learn everything you can about herpes. Terri Warren's book is available in the Kindle version and was very helpful for me. Nothing eats you alive quite like the "what ifs" and not knowing. Likewise, second-guessing past decisions will make you crazy. Everyone you ever meet would like to go back in time and do a few things differently. Learning from past choices and moving forward anyway is one of the bravest things we will ever do.

 

If you have anyone in your life you can share this with, when you're ready, it really helps to ease the burden and the shame. For me, that meant a therapist. I told one friend and she wasn't judgmental, but she just wasn't able to offer me the support I needed either. Even so, I still felt like a tremendous weight had been lifted.

 

All of the work you've done to get yourself to where you are today is definitely not for nothing. It's what's going to give you the strength to turn this newest setback into yet another strength. Not today, and probably not tomorrow, but it's coming. The fourth sentence in your post is the clue. You've done it before and you'll do it again. But for now, have a good cry. {Hugs} to you.