or has my Dsis exposed me to HIV risk?

[SinkerSailor]

I'm 4 months pregnant. I suffer from anxiety but I'm not on medication currently, because of the pregnancy. I'm really worried about something my sister has done. I don't know if I'm being unreasonable.

Firstly, my Dsis recently cheated on her DH with a guy who travels the world for work and who sleeps around a lot. I've sworn not to tell anyone.

Secondly, Dsis also has a close friend who is an HIV-positive gay man. He only got diagnosed recently. Apparently, Dsis and her friend like to kiss each other 'for laughs' when they get drunk. I am aware that kissing is almost zero risk, but apparently there can be a small risk if there are mouth ulcers/gum disease or similar.

Thirdly, Dsis stayed at my house for a week recently. Halfway through her visit I realised she had been using my razor. I may have used it after her, I'm not sure. Apparently a few cases have been recorded of HIV transmission through shared razors.

I got so anxious about this yesterday that I had to speak to DH, but I didn't tell him about the cheating, only kissing the gay guy. We agreed that I would ask Dsis to take an HIV-test, mentioning only that I'm worried for her health.

Today, when I spoke to Dsis, she agreed to take a test. She will probably have to wait six weeks to do this.

However... she also told me that, while they used condoms for PIV, she also had unprotected oral sex with the guy she cheated on her DH with. Now I am even more worried. I have promised Dsis not to tell anyone she has cheated on her DH but if I'm at risk, then my DH is at risk and he needs to know. Or am I being hysterical about this?

Please go easy on me.

Ok - I’m an actuary so in a situation like this - I do the maths!

Probability of musician friend having HIV - well let’s be really really over exaggerated and give it a 1 in 10 chance. In reality it is much much less than that but I think even you realise that it will be less than 1 in 10.

Probability of passing on HIV to your sister by oral sex - quick google gives less than 1 in 2500.

Probability of passing on via razor. Actually so non existent that I can’t find statistics for it. But let’s assume that you and your sister are both so bad at shaving that you are drawing loads of blood and the risk is the same as needle sharing. That is obviously too cautious but we will go with it. Risk from single shared needle is 1 in 149.

So your odds are

1 in 10 1 in 2500 1 in 149 = About 1 in 3.7 million.

I’m not going to tell you all the things that have a higher risk than my (very very prudent) 1 in 3.7 million. But it is pretty much everything!

The risk of you getting HIV is pretty much 0 OP, which others have said. Even If your sister did have HIV (which I think is very very very unlikely), she'd have to cut herself, you'd then have to use the razor straight afterwards and cut yourself and even then it would still be only 1/1000 risk absolute max.

You can't catch HIV from kissing, I think theoretically if they both had raging gum disease that was bleeding spontaneously and profusely (which almost never happens) but I dont think it's ever happened, there's no risk to your sister there. And if your sister had that level of gum disease you would know because you would smell it.

I understand how irrational health anxiety can be, I can worry about all sorts of health issues over and over again, and even though you know that logically you don't have HIV, or other conditions it's so hard to stop worrying once that seed is planted, there's no need for anyone to be a dick about it. The PP who have been twats to the OP look more like twats than OP who is just clearly very anxious.

I suspect that the anger at your sister for the affair and also putting it on you is also present.

OP.

I have/do work closely with people who have blood borne viruses. Yes this includes HIV/AIDS.

It's actually not that easy to catch HIV. Like many posters have said you need to be in direct contact with fresh blood to catch it. HIV itself is actually quite trap as a virus because it effectively dies as soon as it leaves it's host i.e. the human body. It's also really unstable when heated as well.
You're not going to catch it from saliva and you're not going to catch it from a shared razor. My service users have done/Do some seriously dubious things and they still haven't caught HIV.

And it isn't like the killer virus that it used to be when I was a child. Antiretroviral treatment nowadays is so good it reduces the viral load to as close to zero (I.e. you can't detect it in a blood sample) as is possible. And like one doctor I know who knows a hell of a lot about this said that HIV now can be treated like several other chronic conditions I.e. you're always going to have it but it isn't going to kill you. He said that given a choice he would rather HIV over some of the other blood borne viruses out there.

I am sure your sister is fine. HIV is carried in blood, don't forget that. Yes I know she used your razor but if neither of you cut yourselves, no risk and it doesn't sound likely that she is HIV+ anyway.

Make sure she doesn't ever use your razor again though, it's not a nice thing to do.

Why she has to wait six weeks for an HIV test I honestly don't understand. Most areas have walk in clinics to test for all STDs and they don't keep patients waiting long for results.

Chin up, all will be well.

Quite trap= quite crap

You don't need to wait 6 weeks for a test. Most clinics now are offering a rapid assay test that'll give you your results in anything between 3-5 minutes. That gives you a yes or a no answer.

For the patients that do get a yes answer, that's when you would do the blood tests to find out what their CD4 (i.e. how much of a viral load you have in your blood) is.

Tell your BiL. You know she's been having unprotected sex with a man who seemingly has sex with multiple women. Her marriage is less important than BiL being able to refuse to put himself at risk of HIV due to her behaviour.

Jesus Christ. Now I am fully fully against spreading the misinformation surrounding HIV, absolutely believe that this is something that needs to be fully stamped out from society. However, give the op a break! Anxiety in pregnancy can be excruciatingly debilitating, cause genuine risk of serious harm and is wildly underestimated. I don’t just mean ‘oh don’t mind her anxiety, she’s pregnant,’ sort of levels but the level of anxiety that becomes a genuinely severe mental health issue with long lasting effects, and I speak from painful experience.

I developed anxiety like this when I was about 5 months pregnant. It eventually hospitalised me until my baby was born. I was a nervous wreck 24/7. Seriously, my every waking moment I literally shook with fear about everything. Couldn’t turn the tv on because literally everything triggered me. I spent all my non working time tearing my house apart because I was looking desperately for a receipt for an item I had bought 10 or so years before (which unsurprisingly didn’t exist anymore!), freaking out that I was being surveyed (by mysterious persons unknown), convinced I was going to get the sack and bring down my business (i’m An admin assistant for God’s sake), obsessively checking the paper trail of just about every financial transaction I had ever made, replaying every mistake I had ever done and so on. And the worse thing is that even when I found the thing that could completely reassure me away from the madness, my respite would last for 5 minutes before the next unreasonable episode started. And I knew I was unreasonable, I absolutely knew it! But I literally couldn’t help myself. I was suicidal, a danger to myself and my poor dh literally had to lock sharp objects away. And no one knew apart from him as I swore him to secrecy. The anxiety eventually made me ill - my blood pressure was so high the midwife told me ‘I can’t understand how you’re still alive.’ That was helpful! So I was in hospital for 6 weeks because my bp would go from normal to deadly in minutes, all the time.

It felt like I had gone truly mad because I am a very logical person. The day my ds was born it went away. The after effects haven’t. I am much better, on meds now though. My dh and I decided to stop at 1 child because I couldn’t put us through that again. My dh is still struggling with that time. Seriously suffering. It has changed everything.

So please don’t assume that the op is being bigoted, hysterical, all the negative things. HIV myths are still prevalent in our society. That is wrong, a thousand times over, it needs to stop. But the fact is, this has made it into a misplaced bogeyman and the OP is latching onto that because it exists as a trope. I latched onto the idea of going to jail for some reason. I am the most law abiding person you can think of, which probably explains how disproportionate my fear was. But I could have had the biggest expert in the land come and explain away all of my anxieties and I would have believed them for about 5 minutes... then I would have remembered a tiny detail I had forgotten to mention and fallen apart thinking it negated the explanation.

Please try to be understanding and not spread the myth that anxiety in pregnancy is trivial.

Op: just get an HIV test to stop your anxiety, because it doesn’t matter what anyone says to you you’ll think you could be that 1 in a million. And you could be. So just get tested.

You don't need to wait 6 weeks for a test. Most clinics now are offering a rapid assay test that'll give you your results in anything between 3-5 minutes

Yes and no. Rapid assays generally only tell you about whether infection occurred anywhere up to 3 months ago. This is due to the window period. Window period is the time between when an infection occurred and when the test can reliably detect it. Rapid assays only detect HIV antibody which takes up to 3 months for the body to produce.

Standard blood tests are usually 4th generation antigen/antibody tests which can detect HIV from around 4 weeks after infection was contracted. The reason for this is because the HIV antigen (part of the virus) is detectable before the antibody is produced.

For the patients that do get a yes answer, that's when you would do the blood tests to find out what their CD4 (i.e. how much of a viral load you have in your blood) is.

Anyone with a positive rapid assay has a serology test (standard blood test) for HIV to confirm the result.
CD4 cells are a type of lymphocyte (white blood cell) which are the cells particularly damaged by untreated HIV. CD4 count is used as a surrogate marker for the immune system.

Viral load refers to how much HIV virus is detected in 1 ml of blood. In someone on effective treatment the viral load should be fully suppressed or “undetectable”

As regards turn around time (how quickly you get results) they should be available within a couple of days - at the very most a week - from most NHS sexual health clinics or your GP

@ThatEscalatedQuickly I am fully away of how anxiety feels, thank you - I suffer from it pretty much every waking moment, and some sleeping ones too, come to that. I still don't find it remotely acceptable to perpetuate the kind of hyperbolic nonsense that saw gay people and HIV+ people ostracised and treated like lepers for many years.

@SinkerSailor Cruel is the last thing I am, actually. I find it really offensive to insinuate that you can contact HIV from kissing someone HIV+. It's taken decades to get away from those attitudes.

I hope you get help with your health anxiety.

*aware

Truly bad health anxiety is not rational and actually has been described very similar OCD, as obsessive, intrusive thoughts creep in and take hold. Not rational and can be very difficult to control.

If you are that experienced I would have thought you'd have had some sympathy rather than kick a panicking OP when they are down. You can still get your point across re negative attitudes and ostracism but your initial post didn't even try and make the points you are now highlighting.

@mumoftwoyoungkids I like your maths! I’m not sure about OP but I find that rational counter argument very helpful for my anxiety. It doesn’t work straight away, but it’s like a slow counter army in my brain.

very low risk