Haunting Sexual Pasts

I am sure my friends love how easily I throw them under the bus, offering up stories of their various sexual shenanigans and past love lives. Due to the nature of today’s post, I will not be offering up any of their stories because if I did, I would be unfriended by everybody I know on Facebook. Thus, I offer up a completely fictional friend and she shall be named Patricia. Patricia has an embarrassing secret. She is in her 40s and has had only three lovers in her past. No, that is not the embarrassing secret. Her secret is that despite her best attempts to be safe and only be in long-term monogamous relationships, she was left with a parting gift from her second lover: genital herpes. She did not even know of this gift that keeps on giving until years after she had ended that second relationship. How do any of us, like Patricia, know if the past will ever come back to haunt us?

I am pretty sure that some of you reading this may be thinking back to your sexual past and remembering a time or two when, in the heat of the moment, you threw caution to the wind and decided you could have sex “just this one time” without using a condom. It happened/happens to the best of us. Is it something we should be fretting over if it only happened once or twice in our sexual history? More than likely not, according to experts (although there are some cases, like Patricia up there), especially if somebody had themselves tested for sexually transmitted diseases like HIV and tested negative. However, if your past included many careless nights where condoms were not used, the risk greatly increases. It also increases depending on the number of different partners you had. Like Patricia, there are some people walking around who may not even realize they were infected with an STD in their past.

Many sexually transmitted diseases like gonorrhea and chlamydia have no true symptoms and are often left untreated because of this. This can cause the carrier to get a pelvic inflammatory disease which, in turn, can lead to ectopic pregnancies or even infertility. The most common transmitted sexual disease is HPV (genital human papillomavirus) which can potentially cause cervical cancer or genital warts. According to Dr. Jeanne Marazzo, an associate professor at the University of Washington, over twenty-five percent of women aged 40 or over are infected with genital herpes. She states, “It can cause periodic outbreaks of genital sores, but the greatest risk is during childbirth, when an active infection can be transmitted to your newborn, with potentially fatal consequences.”

If your sexual past has any sketchy moments, there is no need to panic. Engage your physician or gynecologist in a frank discussion of your sexual past, especially if you are pregnant or planning on getting pregnant soon. Be proactive and ask your physician for bloodwork in order to check for common sexually transmitted diseases as well as HIV. If you are a woman, be sure to get Pap smears done every single year because these will be able to determine any precancerous conditions. No matter what age you are, always use condoms with any and all sexual partners to eliminate the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.