youandme

Hey RG!
Well, I´ll try to answer a few of your questions.

First of all, it is possible that you have just a normal cold going on. Maybe you got it from this guy? As for the genital sensations, possible that it is just a yeast infection, could have been triggered by sex or something else.

Having said that, I´ll go over to the hsv part. It is said that symptoms of a primary ob often start 2-20 days past exposure. But it could be the very next day, or 10 years later. The virus is complicated in that way, many people don´t know they have the virus due to lack of symptoms or very mild symptoms confused with something else. But very often the symptoms do start within those 2-20 days.

If it is a primary ob then the flue like symptoms are quite common. In my case those started about 3-4 days past exposure. The symptoms are usually described as general achines of the muscles, tiredness, maybe a headache, slight fever and so on. Congestion and coughing would not be normal symptoms, that would indicate a general cold, which one could of course have at the same time.

The genital symptoms can be very varied. For a primary ob there are usually blisters, lesions, a rash or cuts involved. But not always. It could be just burning, itching, discomfort, tingling etc..Again, a complicated virus with a large spectrum of symptoms.

Testing: the quickest way to know is to have a swab and a culture. But if you don´t have any blisters or lesions to swab, then that is ruled out. Even if you had it is good to keep in mind that the possibilities for false negatives are big. After a negative swab it would always be good to have a blood test, just in case.

Blood tests: what you need is a type specific Igg blood test. This will tell you if you have hsv and what type. You could have hsv-1, mainly considered as oral herpes but easily transfered to the genital area as well. Or you could have hsv-2, which prefers the genital area. Or you could of course have both, hsv-1 is very very common, even if you never had cold sores.

The thing with the blood test is that you do need to wait for a while before you have one. It takes time for the body to build antibodies to hsv. It´s recommended that you have a blood test 12-16 weeks past your exposure or onset of your primary. Any test done before that could still give you a false negative. So taking a test at 6 weeks is not conclusive, better to wait. I know it´s a long wait, but to be on the sure side it´s your only option. Of course you could take it at 6 weeks and if it was positive then that would be it. It could also mean that you have had the virus for a longer time, just not known it.

Hope that helped a bit!