symptoms

[bamboosalt]

i would say everyone 's ARS symptoms are different.

from what i heard by chat, they all experiences different degree of Fever, but some of them had sore throat, some had rash, some went to hosipital for intensive care.

even their symptoms occur on different period, the fast one like on day 8, and quite many said after 3 weeks.

[inexperiencedidiot]

If you had unprotected sex and are worried you might have gotten something there is nothing else you can do than get tested. It is the only thing that will be able to bring your mind peace, otherwise nothing that anyone will say will make you feel relaxed.

The only thing that can give you your sanity back is a test saying you are Negative.

Good luck.

[samkiss]

its been 5 months since i had unprotcd sex,i havn't been sick eva since then.im scared of goin for a test.my greatest worry is the problem of pubic hair ingrows allready had before is wostening.pleas help im realy scared

[monkeyflower]

Your post made me incredibly sad. You are putting yourself under insane pressure to be who your parents want you to be. What about being WHO YOU ARE? You don't have to be someone else to earn love. You are lovable just as you are.

You clearly desperately want to please your family, to have them love you, to be who they want you to be... but you can only be *yourself*. I think all of this HIV stuff is just a means of punishing yourself for being gay, feeling like you're disappointing your family, everything.

In the end, while some may not agree with who you are, and may not agree with the choices you make, you have to come to the realization that you can only be yourself. You're making yourself a slave to others by trying only to please them. You can't live your whole life only doing what other people want you to do--even when they're your parents (I must say that your family is doing a fine job of controlling you with all this guilt). And by the way, you are fine *just as you are*... but you have to realize that for yourself. Counseling will help. I wish you the best. It's not an easy path, but you can do it.

[monkeyflower]

It makes me so sad to read your posts. I'm sorry you're feeling so much pressure from your parents, but there's nothing wrong with being gay.

And just because you're gay doesn't mean you're going to get HIV at all. Millions and millions of people are gay and HIV-free. You're feeling bad about being gay, so you're using HIV to torture yourself.

Counseling. That's all I can say to you.

[bamboosalt]

thanks for your kind letter.

i had risk , i know HIV/AIDS will punish me some day in my life because i had gay experience. i was very sexcual acitive when i was 22-23, had about 10 partners which one night stand, we had only handjobs and protected oral. i know the risk, i know in the western world, gays are more common to have HIV. no partner in 2004, 1 in 2005 handjob. 2 in 2006-2007, the last one i do think he is POZ.

that is all in my life so far. risk from 0.0001-0.

i have my bottom line , which is no any unprotected intercourse.

i think i am a nice man, i had a girlfriend in 2003, she asked for a sex with me, well, i did everything with condoms, she wanna unprotected, i refused. why? i am afriad that i was POZ at that time, would make her infected. i just wanna her be safe.

finally, i discovered that i am pure gay, it makes my life terrible.

i was lucky that i was negative till Jan,2007. i do know the bad luck will come into my life some day , but, i could not accept it.

[bamboosalt]

thanks again,

i am feeling so sad now.really.

msn: bamboo-***@****

[bamboosalt]

thanks for your reply.

i dont think you have HIV, again ARS onset not early than 7 days mostly. mine is on day 8.

very fit the timeframe, have already told by Dr.HHH.

i could not say anything to my parents, they will be very crazy once they heard i am Poz. last time, i just told my dad that i am gay, he was upset and crying at his office for days. He is a very strong man, never had this feeling before, he told me that he feels so hopless, because he did not educate me well.

i am the only child in my family, they are waiting for my marriage news since years ago. i am almost 27 now.

currently i am not living with them, i will be back to my home country 1st March for good.

i can see my father 's msn appears online everyday, i always made my msn offline. i dont wanna talk to him at the moment, because he can feel the strange from my words.

i love my parents, i am so self-fish. i never made them happy in my entire life, always bring the pressure to them.

everytime i get sick, my Mather could not sleep well, last time, she lost her hair quite much, all this due to my bad behaviour.

let me say if i am poz, i can have 10 years life with good meds, alright. time goes fast. 10 years? too short for me, i need more time to enjoy my life with my parents.

[kimoz]

Bamboo I have follow alot of your post. Guess what I am going through similar experience as you do. Many unexplainable symptoms shortly after a suspicous encounter. The first thing i had in my mind is hiv too when I first develop a fever. I think we have similar risk, maybe mine is even slightly higher. And if you ask me I am very much convinced myself that I am infected too, even though everyone around don't think so. We have similar time frame of onset of symptoms too, yours around day 6 mine is day 5, except my symptoms last longer than yours. Anyway I still think its very very likely that you will be fine, I am already preparing for the worst myself though. If either one of us turn out positive, maybe we can make history to become the first to get infected this way (Ok that is meant to be a joke, but lets take it easy we are all going through the same thing here) Good luck!

[bamboosalt]

thanks everybody.

i did not eat anything these 5 days, i could not face my result next tuesday. you know i really think i am Poz. my symptoms on day 6 after expouse, came quickly and i got no time to think about what happend to my body. it was nightmare, i dont think you guys have ever experienced this , made me scared really.

my partner, i know nothing about his status. only the test his done last month, which might be a fake paper, in window period, or typed by himself.

he refused to answer any questions about HIV, what can i do ?

4 days to collect my result. i can imagine that i will cry when i talk to the nurse next time, and she only can gave me some nice words for hope.

[Xhost]

Bamboo,

Wow, can see that you're in a bad place right now. For that I am sorry. Many of us here know what it is like to be in your shoes, trust me. Most of us have been right where you are, sweating out an HIV test, unsure of what we read, reading too much about HIV, unable to logically process what people are telling us. In short, you are in the grip of HIV anxiety, and it can be a pernicious and terrible affliction.

The first step in getting out of this self imposed hell is to realize you have the power to do so. The simple fact is this: you do not have HIV, could not have gotten it from the encounter that you described. That's it, no ifs, ands or buts. In all of the years of the HIV virus, through millions upon millions of infections, no one has contracted HIV in the manner that you have described. No documented cases of having caught it in this way exist. Think about that for just a second. Not a single person out of millions. We could discuss the reasons for this, go into the mechanics of HIV transmission and the like, but really, just the fact that it has never happened should be a pretty good indication of the fact that HIV ins't transmitted in these ways.

I know, right now it's hard to think rationally about all of this. It seems you are drowning in a pool of anxiety, trapped by your fears. The more you think about it, the more you want to read about it, the more you read about it, the more you think about it, until finally, one day, you're convinced you've got it. But that belief isn't based in fact, it is based on emotion. Your problem now isn't that you may have HIV (you do not), it is anxiety, maybe depression and stress.

It really is amazing what anxiety and stress can do to one's mental and physical condition. And I speak from experience. I too had a low risk exposure, but when I was going through this hell, I didn't believe it was so low risk. No matter what anyone told me, doctors, counselors, nurses, Internet forum posters, I not only didn't listen, I found myself incapable of listening. I had every symptom in the book, save for a few: dramatic weight loss, ulcers in the mouth, enlarged lymph nodes, night sweats, severe sore throat, etc. You name it, I had it. I was sure that this was it, my ticket was punched.

Funny thing, though, as time passed I began to realize that my symptoms weren't due to HIV, they were due to anxiety, or stress, or guilt, or whatever. I eventually realized that I needed a bit of help to deal with what I was going through. So, I decided to seek a bit of therapy. And after a while, I gradually began to realize what my problem was, and it wasn't HIV.

Another funny thing, once I realized that I didn't have HIV, all of my "symptoms" just faded away. I came to understand that my lymph nodes hadn't really been any larger than normal, I only thought they were because I read somewhere that that was a symptom of primary HIV infection. My sore throat? A common, everyday cold. Weight loss? I was so stressed, I wasn't eating very much. Night sweats? Well, that trickle of sweat running down my back didn't really constitute a night sweat. In other words, everything I thought was a symptom really wasn't - I just came to believe that they were. I literally went to bed one night feeling crappy and woke up the next day feeling pretty good. Amazing, isn't it?

Does any of this sound familiar to you, Bamboo? If so, do yourself a favor and spend a little bit of time each day not thinking about HIV. Instead, try to think about why you are really going through this. What is it that is causing your fear, your anxiety, really? It isn't HIV - I know that, and one day, you will too.

Just a final bit of advice before I end this, the longest ever post on MedHelp. If you are worried about the things going on in your body, visit with a doctor and let he or she check you out. Talk about your physical "symptoms", and also talk about the anxiety you are experiencing. The doctor may be able to help in that regard, either with a prescription or a referal to a mental health specialist (the latter did me a world of good, and you might find it beneficial as well).

In the meantime, good luck dealing with your anxiety. The good news is that one day you will look back on all of this, shake your head, and wonder how you ever worked yourself up into such a state. I do it, and you will too.

Take care of yourself.

[WorriedT]

Hi bamboosalt. I think you'll find most health workers who catch HIV through a health setting normally do so through needle stick injuries. The presence of blood in needles stops the blood from drying, therefore extending the lifespan of the virus out of the human body.

The reason why they are so careful is because there are other blood borne diseases that are much easier to catch than HIV. Hep B is an example.

[txtony]

1.the reason everyones ars symptoms are different is because it is unrelated to hiv. either their neg,or never had a risk.
2.cant self diagnose hiv through symptoms, proven time and time again, symptoms are unreliable.
testing tells the story, if 6 wks then 3 mos test, then by conservative testing your neg. with a risk.
if no risk, then no need for testing. good luck.

[bamboosalt]

from all studies, ARS symptoms indeed happend, and about 90% people will experience it.
sounds ARS is reliable, but different people might very different feeling during the scikness, someone serious sick , someone mild.
if not, why experts published ARS symptoms on line and why studied them.

[txtony]

ars does happen in 90 percent of infected with hiv, includes mainly fever and other symptoms, BUT individual symptoms are unreliable in diagnosing hiv, only hiv test will tell the story.

[monkeyflower]

0% get positive results. Why? Because they were at negligible risk to begin with. The people who tend to frequent these forums are not people at any realistic risk. They're wracked with guilt, whether over sexual orientation, going outside an otherwise monogamous relationship, having an "inappropriate" partner, whatever. Or they're depressed, have OCD, isolated, feeling anxious about other issues and/or changes in their lives, etc. HIV isn't the problem. Their feelings are the real issue.

As for symptoms, many, many other things besides ARS can cause the exact same symptoms, and with much greater frequency. Think of it this way: say you have a headache. That's one symptom... but it could have been caused by a migraine, tension, a brain tumor, a stroke, or something you'd only see on House... Would you automatically go, "Oh my god, I'm 18 and perfectly healthy, so obviously I must have (insert incredibly obscure disease here)!!!"? I think not. Does that make sense?

[Teak]

The only time ARS can be confirmed, is when someone's HIV test is confirmed positive. Then and only then can you correlate the two. Other than that they are only symptoms of a million other things.

[bamboosalt]

i know symptoms are vary. but, dont we need to be careful when we have some weird flulike symptoms after sex with some one who are status unknown.

if the hosipital, if you have this symptoms and telling them u are gay,  i guess 99% doctors will suggest have a HIV test.

you said my risk is ZERO, but, other offical websites like CDC had already said all sex fluid exchange should be considered as risk, excpet intact skin. dickhead is a special part which always tend to have some cuts also foreskin, dont u think ?

[Teak]

bamboo, you had or gave a handjob and some rimming. You were never at risk. If you had any symptoms why didn't you see a doctor instead of making every excuse in the world that it can only be related to HIV? You didn't have a risk. Do we need to go back through all your posts? You don't get infected by handjobs or rimming. Period.. You are not even trust worthy in what you type. You just lied in another forum about what Dr. H had said to you. Which he had not said at all. He said, you were never at risk. If you want the infection so bad, go have a real risk. You won't be able to change your mind after you are truly infected.

[bamboosalt]

Serocconversion occurs within 4-6 weeks and ARS typically has onset a 7-14 days after exposure. In other words, most people seroconvert with a time course similar to that of ARS. Therefore, the answer is yes: 2 weeks after onset of ARS, almost everybody will have a positive antibody test--that is, they will have seroconverted.

this was a message from Dr.HHH for another person.

i guess your ARS timing is quite different than his, you said takes weeks, no early than 2 weeks?

i did not lie in anthor forum, the time i copy paste the info from Dr.HHH to your forum, i did not get the second reply from Dr.HHH. after some mins, i got all feedback.

[bamboosalt]

please read this http://www.bmc.org/HIV-AIDS/HIV-PcktBk_WEB.pdf

[Teak]

I said two to four weeks. Which you didn't have a risk so it's a nill point. Again, you can not say that anyone that has symptoms are having ARS, without a positive HIV test result. ARS is after the fact. That is the reason HIV can not be diagnosed by symptoms.  

[bamboosalt]

i have read your previous post to someone who reported his ARS occur on day 7-8?

you told her/him ARS that ARS wont be that early. at least 2 weeks.

[bamboosalt]

i have a question for you .

since you said HIV virus will die quickly after out of body, like you metioned hanjobs contacted POZ semen no risk no matter cuts ot wounds. however, why there are many cases have been reported which are healthcare workers infected by blood sample? they got infected sometimes when they perform a test without gloves, the blood get into their cuts ot wounds. sometimes the nurses look afrter the aids patients with gloves. if all body fluid became weak out of body, why the health care workers are so careful.

[bamboosalt]

the percentage is not important for HIV.
i guess anyone in high risk group such as Gay, Bi-sexual,Iv drug users, should notice their sex risk and symptoms, because i have read many post in another forum, all messages tell us HIV is still very common among us.

i think u know the fourm i am talking about. even many people were infected by unprotected anal, however, still a chance for a percentage people got it by giving oral. sometimes a single event made you being infected.

i think most of us have been educated well related to sex risk since it is required content in the developed nations.

i really hope i am Negative, and i can learn from my all risk behaviour, re-educate myself to be more careful because not every time is that kinda lucky.