Lindzi Wessel: A Herpes Love Story

Nothing can come between Lindzi Wessel and her new boyfriend, David -- except maybe herpes.

Lindzi Wessel is a science and health journalist who recently graduated from the UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program. Before turning her sights on journalism, she studied the mind, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in psychology and master’s in neuroscience from UC Davis. She has covered topics ranging from wildfire management to Zika transmission for outlets including The San Jose Mercury News, Alzforum, and STAT. For the moment, she resides in DC where she is writing for Science. Lindzi is a traveler who enjoys spending time outdoors and in the presence of dogs, whenever possible.

This story originally aired on Sept. 8, 2017, in an episode titled “Chemistry.”

 
 

Story Transcript

So I first met David when he showed up at our neuroscience graduate school orientation twenty minutes late and wearing toe shoes. Just a few days earlier, he had cycled into Davis, California, from Portland, Oregon, a thousand miles away by bike. He had lots of options for grad school, but he had chosen ours because he felt the students were down to earth and because it was close to skiing. Sometimes he and I would hit the mountains together, sometimes we’d bike and other times we’d just talk about life over beers. I had never been the sappy type. But I started to realize that I just kinda always wanted to hang out with David, and when he told me that he kinda always wanted to hang out with me too, it made me really happy.

It was spring in California and everything was beautiful, and I just thought, Nothing is going to shake this wonderful feeling that I have. Except maybe herpes. Herpes shook things up a little bit. So probably all of you know that herpes is a sexually transmitted disease that can cause painful outbreaks in some very private areas, and it's contagious and lifelong so it doesn't exactly make dating easy. So when David called me to tell me that he had tested positive for this virus, he was not feeling great. I went over right away, and he started to tell me everything that he knew. He had tested positive for both types of herpes, herpes type 2, the infamous STD, and herpes type 1, which is more common and much less stigmatized form we tend to associate with cold sores.

He had never had a symptom for either, but he was told by the doctors that he could pass either virus on to a partner. He was so upset and just shocked that he had paid $200 right there for another test. But by the time I got to him, he was resigned. He knew denial wasn't really going to help anything. So, to be honest, at this point I honestly wasn't that alarmed. I mean I just I told David like, Let's hold off on the physical stuff. No sex obviously but also like we just to be safe no kissing but just in time I could do a little research to figure out the best way to protect myself. And how hard could it be? So the next day I launch in with your typical Google searches, and things go downhill instantly. Let me just recommend that if you ever have the temptation to do a Google image search for herpes, you squash that. Your whole screen transforms into a checkerboard of all these body parts that you never wanted to see sporting the worst-case scenario of all sorts of rashes that you never wanted to know existed. And the more that I researched, things just got worse. I started to realize that everything that I had thought I had known about herpes wasn't actually true.

While it is accurate that herpes is most likely to spread when there's an active outbreak, it can be spread to a partner when no obvious symptoms are present. Also, herpes can nest outside of the area that condoms cover. And so while condoms can be effective, they can also be pretty much useless. And the cold sore kind of herpes can definitely spread to your junk so I'm panicking a little. Actually I'm kind of panicking a lot, and it's not just because the situation that I thought was a take-minor-precautions situation has now transformed into a herpes-owns-your-ass kind of situation. It's not the only reason I'm panicking. I'm also panicking because I'm realizing those minor precautions might not have protected me from some risks I had already taken. David and I really liked each other so of course we’d kissed quite a bit and don't tell my mom or anything, but that's not all we've done. So I start hallucinating symptoms instantly. I’ve got the tingles and the itches on my mouth and on my other parts. But fortunately my logical brain kicks in and says, You know it's very unlikely that you already contracted this. So like let's just focus on prevention. So my best option seems to be finding a way to make sure that David isn't contagious before getting too close to him. And by this point I'd gone, with all my research and like Googling everything, I've gone a little crazy enough to think that I could write a protocol for this myself.

No really, because it really all we need to do right is like take a swab and test for the presence of the virus. And if the virus wasn't there then we'd be good. Maybe that could work, right? But I honestly didn't get very far before realizing that this was going to cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars that frankly we didn't have so. And logistically right it's just a nightmare because you're swabbing down your boyfriend, you're amplifying the sample, and then you're down in some probes to see if the virus shows up. Even for the most die-hard scientists, it's a far cry from dinner and a movie.

So I'm kind of starting to realize that maybe there's no way for me to be with this guy and guarantee myself a herpes-free future. I have to dump him, right? I mean, who wants to be that person that, thinking they're in love, makes some huge sacrifice for something that maybe wasn't going to work out anyways. And then where are you? Single and with herpes. But my mind kept going to my aunt and uncle who, everyone who knows them says, is the picture of true love. When they were teenagers, my mom's family tried desperately to break them up. And that was because my uncle wasn't Jewish, but they, even at that young age, knew that something so trivial shouldn't get in the way of love.

It's real. And they're still making each other happy sixty years later. I can't help but wonder if herpes would have stopped them even if Jewish grandmothers couldn't. But fortunately we don't live in a world where you have to ask that kind of deep personal question to someone you know and who loves you now. No, instead, I turn to complete strangers on the internet. I joined an anonymous herpes forum and I read about the lives of people with herpes. So, on this forum, I read about some really actually upsetting things. I read about a man who had stopped dating and dropped all his friends because he was too ashamed to tell them why he wasn't trying to pick up women anymore. And I read about a woman who had decided to stay with a boyfriend who hit her because he had also given her herpes and she thought no one else could love her again. I was just horrified. Just totally enraged. And I even went to David and I said, “How could our society just ridicule and dismiss these people who haven't done anything wrong? These other human beings.” And then I went back to researching herpes, leaving my glum boyfriend to contemplate the prospect of being alone forever alone.

Throughout this whole process, these weeks that this was going on, David had actually been quite patient, but one day during a walk on campus, his patient seemed suddenly to snap. He asked me to sit down with him on the grass and started telling me he was getting really fed up with my process. We had never really argued before, but he was upset and I got upset in response. Didn't he realize how much work I was doing and how much I was considering risking for him? Voices were raised. Things got a bit ugly. I went home crying. I called my sister and I told her, “I never want to see this guy again.” David and I were in a class of twelve people so that didn't work out well.

We saw each other later that day and when we ran into each other we stepped into this cold, dark room that I was doing my graduate research in. We apologized for things getting heated and in this room, this room was painted black because of light sensitive experiments that used to go on there and also there were chains that used to hold oxygen tanks that now just sort of like dangled from above. And so he starts to tell me like why he suddenly got so upset, and he told me that on our walk earlier that day I had been drinking a coffee and he had asked for a sip and when he had handed it back, he had seen me, almost subconsciously, take my sleeve and wipe off the straw.

When David said this to me with sadness and really humiliation in his voice, I was so ashamed and everything just hit me right then. I realized that what mattered here wasn't David's situation and that wasn't the problem. The problem was my situation. Whatever research or questions I still thought I had left to answer about the science and the risk of herpes, that wasn't important here. What was important was that I was treating my boyfriend, someone I respected, someone I was in love with, as something dirty and less than human. So I threw my arms around him and I just started kissing him right there, and I told him it was ridiculous and I just didn't care. I just wanted to be with him. And he puts his arms around me too and kisses me back and there, in this dark room with the black walls and the chains hanging down, David tells me that he loves me for the very first time.

About three weeks into our happily ever after. David got results back from that two-hundred-dollar other herpes test that he'd sent away for, and it turned out that after all of that he'd never had herpes in the first place. Along with over 50 percent of Americans he did have the cold-sore type. But for the more stigmatized kind, he had had a false positive due to a common issue with the test.

David's relief at narrowly escaping herpes was palpable, but the results meant nothing to me. I had already made my decision. My relief had come weeks earlier when I narrowly escaped ruining a laughter-filled, loving relationship, a relationship that is now going on for years, over a skin rash. Thank you.