Hi Dr.,
I am sorry to bother you again, but I have another situation, and don’t know where else to get the most accurate answers.
I’m living with my parents right now, and my mother developed a very itchy, painful, large lesion on her finger. It was blistering up, and rapidly becoming larger and swelling, so she asked me to take her to the doctor. I honestly was thinking that it was a bacterial infection, but he took one look at it, and said that it is herpes simplex. He told her that it’s highly contagious, and that she needs to cover it up. He seems to think that she likely caught it from work, where she handles a lot of money and people’s credit cards, etc.
I am very worried, because I think that I am likely to have caught this. We touch all of the same things - the refrigerator, doorknobs, faucets, etc. We also have a dog, and we both pet him all the time She will pet him and then I will, and then he will jump in bed with me to go to sleep when I’m just in my underwear, etc. We use the same bathroom, so I’m sure that she touched my toilet paper. Even worse, I used her nail clipper a few days ago, and I cut myself with it. Besides that, I do have another cut on my hand. Since her symptoms started a few days ago, I feel that I already caught it.
We have not had any direct contact that I can recall, but the doctor says that it is highly contagious and that she needs to keep it covered, because it can be spread easily through just touching the same things. He was so certain about it being herpes that he didn’t want to culture it. It definitely does look like the pictures of herpetic whitlow that I have been looking at, and my dad says it looks like the cold sores that he got as a child.
She is so convinced that it’s not herpes that she thinks it’s absurd. She wants o keep it uncovered because she says that it ‘needs air’, and that it’s not herpes.
Is what he says true? Do you think that I have possibly contracted it?