Quite concerned

[MayflowerUK]

A few months ago a vagrant lady approximately late 60's wandered into our place of work. She had a cut on a nose, where she'd been recently attacked. She seemed a bit upset so we gave her some tissues and left her for a while. Later I came back and picked up the tissues and I'm sure there were some bloodstains on the tissue. Now I'm sure I washed my hands afterwards and used sanitiser liquid afterwards but I sometimes have ezcema and little cuts on my skin from broken glass  and I get torn hangnails as well. I read a lot of conflicting information on the internet about how long HIV lives in drying blood in room temperature outside the body, from 45 seconds to several weeks.

The old lady felt faint and we called an ambulance and when they rolled her sleeve up to place a pressure cuff on her she had what looked like medical IV lines on her arm (a sticky square and a bruise in the middle). Now I'm freaking out that I may have contacted HIV from her (about a month afterwards I did have a sore throat, but I didn't really have any other symptoms of seroconversion)

I'm really scarded. Any advice or reassurance you could give would help me greatly

[MayflowerUK]

Thanks Teak,

I was scared because my uncle who was a intravenous drug user died of HIV about 10 years ago and I've been scared since the end of October that I may have caught the virus from the bloodstain. I did some research about HIV survival outside the body in bloodstains and got some very conflicting viewpoints which lead me to this website.

[Teak]

You didn't have a risk of contracting HIV.