TMI and NSFW
Mark Twain has said that if your job requires you to eat a toad, do it first. If it requires you to eat two toads, eat the larger one first.
If you are in a sexual relationship, your partner will need to be fully on board with protecting your health in order for you to stay together and also successfully get well. My partner was not and so we are divorced.
This is my story. It is descriptive, not prescriptive. This is why my marriage failed. It is NOT me saying ANY of the following about ANYONE else's relationship:
That does NOT mean "It cannot be done." It means I did not succeed. That's all it means.
Sometime after my diagnosis, my ex went somewhere for about two weeks to do some training. My understanding is he went to a military facility that spent very little time in use and was empty like ten months out of the year.
When he returned home, I greeted him enthusiastically and we had sex promptly, having not seen each other in two weeks. After sex, we showered together.
While in the shower together having JUST had sex together, he begins talking about how much he needs this shower and what a horror show the facility was, with mold growing on the ceiling and roaches everywhere and how he chose to like sleep on the couch or something as the least worst option for some reason.
And I'm thinking to myself "You asshole! You couldn't have told me this BEFORE we had sex and gone Darling, I miss you too but, ew, I need a shower FIRST, honey."
That was the most egregious and horrifying incident but he just never could quite get it through his thick skull that his newly diagnosed wife had a seriously compromised immune system and he needed to stop and think and be proactive about germ control. So there was an endless parade of insensitive stupid things he did that were potentially life threatening for me and he just could not get with the program, so we are divorced.
Because of my compromised immune system, anytime I gave a cold to my husband by kissing him and he gave it back to me a few days later, I was much sicker the second time around. It bred in his system, grew stronger and came back to me more virulent than the first round.
So it was just extremely problematic that he was not on board with proactively protecting my health.
I was friends for some years with a physician and I called him a lot for a time the year that I was so sick. I was also looking stuff up online and the only thing I could find that matched a lot of my symptoms was a parasitic infection from a class of parasites called Trypanosoma.
This is a class of parasite responsible for both African Sleeping Sickness and Chagas Disease.
I was on the phone one day with my physician friend and I told him my hypothesis that my husband had somehow picked this up some years earlier when he was in Saudi Arabia for six months and had transmitted it to me sexually and was reinfecting me every time we had sex and this was why I just could NOT get well.
My Mexican-American physician friend had minored in parasitology and he said "With everything you have told me, that makes sense. That's possible."
Because we spoke regularly for a while there, he had heard a lot more about my condition than any of the doctors actually treating me. So on the strength of him saying that to me, I decided right then and there that I would never again have sex with my husband without a condom.
This conversation must have happened in August 2001. I had been diagnosed in May and spent the summer on a treadmill of antibiotics.
With no longer being treated like a hypochondriac, I was being given some really serious drugs with side effects like "may kill you" and having horrendous side effects from the antibiotics.
I say it must have been August because I told my husband that same day "You are never touching me again without a condom" and shortly thereafter I got a new round of Zithromax, which is like my favorite antibiotic ever, and about two weeks after this conversation, sometime in September, my health stabilized and I stopped ending up back in the ER within 48 hours of running out of antibiotics.
That was a major turning point and I slowly began to get better after that.
That principle generalizes in this way: If you have a recurrent infection, you need to figure out how you are getting reinfected. Germs come from somewhere. I don't care what your official diagnosis is, it is not some random roll of the cosmic dice. You need to figure out where you are getting reexposed over and over.
We also used like Saran Wrap with oral sex, a thing I picked up from some movie about some apocolyptic future with some horrendous infection. It actually works.
At a later date, I quit having sex with him entirely for four months. We were getting divorced but still living together and up until then I continued to sleep with him.
One day he asked me what it would take to get me back into bed and I told him "Take the supplements I am taking. I know you think I'm a nutter, but I think you are making me sick."
Because we were getting divorced but didn't have the money to support two households, he was actively volunteering for travel assignments to make the situation easier on everyone. Every single time he left for a while, my health would get better. He would come home and even without sleeping with him, I was back to some stalled place and couldn't escape it.
He was a man of his word and so he took the supplements I gave him and we resumed having sex together. Once he was doing that, I again began making forward progress on my health. He eventually moved out and after he left, steady forward progress was much more reliable and easier to achieve.
If you are having sex with someone, their health impacts yours. They may need to ALSO get treatment for infection in order to resolve the problem because you both may be infected but they may be asymptomatic and if you have a compromised immune system, the germs bred in their body may be stronger than the ones bred in your body.
If you have a sex partner, they have GOT to be 100 percent on board here and you may need to BOTH be treated if infection is part of the equation.
If you are in a sexual relationship, your partner will need to be fully on board with protecting your health in order for you to stay together and also successfully get well. My partner was not and so we are divorced.
This is my story. It is descriptive, not prescriptive. This is why my marriage failed. It is NOT me saying ANY of the following about ANYONE else's relationship:
- You two just need to get divorced!
- He is an evil son of a bitch!
- Sex is the work of the devil!
- Celibacy is your only hope!
That does NOT mean "It cannot be done." It means I did not succeed. That's all it means.
Sometime after my diagnosis, my ex went somewhere for about two weeks to do some training. My understanding is he went to a military facility that spent very little time in use and was empty like ten months out of the year.
When he returned home, I greeted him enthusiastically and we had sex promptly, having not seen each other in two weeks. After sex, we showered together.
While in the shower together having JUST had sex together, he begins talking about how much he needs this shower and what a horror show the facility was, with mold growing on the ceiling and roaches everywhere and how he chose to like sleep on the couch or something as the least worst option for some reason.
And I'm thinking to myself "You asshole! You couldn't have told me this BEFORE we had sex and gone Darling, I miss you too but, ew, I need a shower FIRST, honey."
That was the most egregious and horrifying incident but he just never could quite get it through his thick skull that his newly diagnosed wife had a seriously compromised immune system and he needed to stop and think and be proactive about germ control. So there was an endless parade of insensitive stupid things he did that were potentially life threatening for me and he just could not get with the program, so we are divorced.
Because of my compromised immune system, anytime I gave a cold to my husband by kissing him and he gave it back to me a few days later, I was much sicker the second time around. It bred in his system, grew stronger and came back to me more virulent than the first round.
So it was just extremely problematic that he was not on board with proactively protecting my health.
I was friends for some years with a physician and I called him a lot for a time the year that I was so sick. I was also looking stuff up online and the only thing I could find that matched a lot of my symptoms was a parasitic infection from a class of parasites called Trypanosoma.
This is a class of parasite responsible for both African Sleeping Sickness and Chagas Disease.
I was on the phone one day with my physician friend and I told him my hypothesis that my husband had somehow picked this up some years earlier when he was in Saudi Arabia for six months and had transmitted it to me sexually and was reinfecting me every time we had sex and this was why I just could NOT get well.
My Mexican-American physician friend had minored in parasitology and he said "With everything you have told me, that makes sense. That's possible."
Because we spoke regularly for a while there, he had heard a lot more about my condition than any of the doctors actually treating me. So on the strength of him saying that to me, I decided right then and there that I would never again have sex with my husband without a condom.
This conversation must have happened in August 2001. I had been diagnosed in May and spent the summer on a treadmill of antibiotics.
With no longer being treated like a hypochondriac, I was being given some really serious drugs with side effects like "may kill you" and having horrendous side effects from the antibiotics.
I say it must have been August because I told my husband that same day "You are never touching me again without a condom" and shortly thereafter I got a new round of Zithromax, which is like my favorite antibiotic ever, and about two weeks after this conversation, sometime in September, my health stabilized and I stopped ending up back in the ER within 48 hours of running out of antibiotics.
That was a major turning point and I slowly began to get better after that.
That principle generalizes in this way: If you have a recurrent infection, you need to figure out how you are getting reinfected. Germs come from somewhere. I don't care what your official diagnosis is, it is not some random roll of the cosmic dice. You need to figure out where you are getting reexposed over and over.
We also used like Saran Wrap with oral sex, a thing I picked up from some movie about some apocolyptic future with some horrendous infection. It actually works.
At a later date, I quit having sex with him entirely for four months. We were getting divorced but still living together and up until then I continued to sleep with him.
One day he asked me what it would take to get me back into bed and I told him "Take the supplements I am taking. I know you think I'm a nutter, but I think you are making me sick."
Because we were getting divorced but didn't have the money to support two households, he was actively volunteering for travel assignments to make the situation easier on everyone. Every single time he left for a while, my health would get better. He would come home and even without sleeping with him, I was back to some stalled place and couldn't escape it.
He was a man of his word and so he took the supplements I gave him and we resumed having sex together. Once he was doing that, I again began making forward progress on my health. He eventually moved out and after he left, steady forward progress was much more reliable and easier to achieve.
If you are having sex with someone, their health impacts yours. They may need to ALSO get treatment for infection in order to resolve the problem because you both may be infected but they may be asymptomatic and if you have a compromised immune system, the germs bred in their body may be stronger than the ones bred in your body.
If you have a sex partner, they have GOT to be 100 percent on board here and you may need to BOTH be treated if infection is part of the equation.
