Oral Sex on woman HIV risk

[SF357]

Had a pretty brief experience a week ago.  I am married and have 2 kids.  Been with only my wife for 10 years. Have 100% assurance I have a clean bill of health prior to last weeks drunken decision.  Met a girl at a bar and she came back to hotel after many beers.  She said at one point she didnt want to do anything since I was a married man but after a while we both started kissing.  I went down on her and licked her vagina and sucked on her vagina while fingering her.  I recall she was very dry so I used my saliva by spitting on her vagina to wet it up a little and fingered her more.  As far as I can tell that was the extent of my mouth on her.  I did however continue to finger her and massage her vagina until she was aroused. After that I pulled my finger out and we went to sleep.  I never had any penial sex with her and in fact my pants never came off.  Scared to hell that I may have been able to contract HIV thru this stupid decision.  I am pretty sure the only fluid was my saliva that I spit on her since she was so dry.    I also have very good oral health, see a dentist 2-3 times per year, no cavities or recent dental work.  I did not brush my teeth for about 20 hours prior to this event.  I do not have any visible cuts in or around my mouth and no sores or bleeding gums.  I know by reading all these post the past week I am probably just full of anxiety but still it is consuming every waking minute. I would like to just hear some views on this particular experience and I cannot wait to put this behind me and seek treatment for drinking because without alcohol I would have never been in this situation.

[H. Hunter Handsfield, M.D.]

Congratulations on the negative results.  I agree with your doctor.  Best wishes.

[SF357]

Hello Dr. I just got my test results back.  Negative on the HIV antibody blood test taken 31 days past this incident.  Do you agree with my general Dr. that I should consider this conclusive and move on from this and put it in the past.  I also was negative on all other STD's they screened for.

[H. Hunter Handsfield, M.D.]

I'm glad to hear your doctor and I are in agreement.  You should follow his advice about specific HIV tests and their timing.  I would just recommend that you have blood tests only, not the oral fluids rapid test, for which early testing is less reliable than blood tests.

There are no medicines that alter HIV test reliability, with the possible exceptions of potent chemotherapy or immunosuppressive drugs.  Ativan will have no effect.

[SF357]

One last comment for awhile.  I visited my local Dr. today and explained this incident.  He said that oral carries a very , very low risk.   He thought I should not be overly concerned but agreed that my anxiety is casing me too think the worst.   His plan is to give me Ativan as needed to calm my anxiety for the next couple weeks.  He wants me to return to the clinic the last week of March for a blood test to check for HIV and other STD's since at 4-5 weeks they would show up?   They do not do rapid tests so my question is would the blood test be able to detect any HIV if it were present at 4-5 weeks.  If it were negative would there be any reason to retest at 3 months with a rapid test?

Will Ativan in my system alter any test results?

I will post my results in a few weeks hopefully they will be good.

[H. Hunter Handsfield, M.D.]

Yes, logically I do make sense.  And that should be your take-home message.  I would strongly suggest you stay off the web.  Anxious people tend to be drawn to information that inflames their fears and to miss the reassuring parts.  Here's a comment I wrote in another recent thread:

"Nate Silver is the recently famous statistician (because of his successes in predicting election results) who writes the NY Times' FiveThirtyEight political blog.  In his book 'The Signal and the Noise', Silver writes of a hypothetical hypochondriac with an Internet connection:  'The more time that you give him, the more information he has at his disposal, the more ridiculous the self-diagnosis he'll come up with; before long he'll be mistaking a common cold for the bubonic plague.'  We see this all the time in anxious forum users, mostly fearing they have HIV based on common symptoms of everyday minor illnesses -- but it...applies to risk assessment as well."

[SF357]

Thanks for the feedback.  I still can't help from feeling that I could be that one in thousands that could get infected by what I did that night.   I am hoping you are correct and that I have nothing to worry about but the problem is all I have been doing is thinking about this and searching websites and there are plenty of people out there that say there is a risk and it is a lot higher than people might think.  Logically you make sense and maybe it is just the anxiety and the fact there is a wait time to get tested.  When is the soonest I can get tested with accurate results.  In the meantime I may contact my Dr. and see about getting some anti-anxiety medication to take my mind off things until I can take a test.

[H. Hunter Handsfield, M.D.]

Welcome to the forum.  Thanks for reading over some other threads before posting your own question.

While it may seem that our replies respond to the details of the particular events people ask about, all we really can do is state the same principes:  fingering or hand-genital contact never transmit HIV, and oral sex rarely does; and there are no reported cases of HIV being acquired by cunnilingus (oral contact with an infected woman's vaginal area).  There is nothing in the details you provide about this particular event that changes those facts.  So you should look on this as a zero risk exposure in regard to HIV.  That would be the case even if your partner had HIV -- and probably she was not, since even among very sexually active women fewer than 1 in 1,000 have HIV.

Sometimes people decide to be tested for HIV even if the risk is zero; a negative test result sometimes is more reassuring than anything a distant expert can advice.  But if I were somehow in your situation, I would not feel any need for HIV testing and I would continue unprotected sex with my wife without fear of giving her HIV.

I hope this has helped.  Best wishes--  HHH, MD