I loathe having to get tested.
I haven’t been ho’ing around and I haven’t even done anything risky since I was tested last but I still dread it. I’m sure many of the gay men who read this know exactly what I’m talking about.
That said, last week my dermatologist decided she wanted me to come back to have a sinister looking mole awkwardly located in my um… gluteal cleft (between my butt cheeks) surgically removed.
Honestly, I dreaded my HIV test more than my upcoming *ahem* procedure.
I remember getting those tests done, and they were always terrible, even though I never did anything really that put me in serious danger. Although it is always better to get checked out. It has been so many years since I had one, but I remember my spouse and I when we first started going together were treated very badly by the nurse who gave the results. We asked to be given results together, but he refused and made a big deal like we were positive. It terrified us big time. The nurse had a bad bedside manner.
Glad to know everything worked out in the end (except for that mole). I am glad I don’t have to go through that anymore.
The last time I got tested, they used this quicker test which was like a nasty-ass stick that you had to put in your mouth for 5 minutes. But I agree, there is something extremely weird and uncomfortable about the whole thing… even if you know that you haven’t engaged in any risky behavior.
The oral 20 minute test has been pulled by many local agencies after a string of false positives at the LA Gay and Lesbian Center. I got tested at MPowerOC (a young mens center in OC) and they used the 20 minute blood test.
I think I could have gone 60 or 70 years easy without knowing this :/
David Roberts
As it’s a Friday Folly…Daniel, that will teach you to hang around with sinister looking moles.Stay away from that bar in future. K?(and point taken David. The next Friday Folly will be Fed-Ex’d to you in a time capsule.)Have a good weekend everyone. With several birthday’s bearing down on us (not to name names, but one being the D of D&G) we’ve got the entire family together for a big Vietnamese blow out. The three year old loves that fact all the food is served “her size”. After she’s bored with eating she happily makes rice paper rolls for everyone for ever… oh, no, please, 211 is MY LIMIT!
There’s kind of an urban myth going around about gays putting gerbils up, um, *there*, but a “sinister-looking mole”? Ouch.
grantdale said:
(and point taken David. The next Friday Folly will be Fed-Ex’d to you in a time capsule.)
Thank you very much 🙂 Perhaps future “Folly” won’t involve the intimate anatomy of the author and we can forgo the time-shift.
David Roberts
It’s great to promote testing and all, but honestly I could have gone the rest of my life quite contentedly not knowing about your butt mole.
Daniel,
Well, you’re going to have fun trying to explain why you’re walking funny!! Conversations including the phrase “my butt crack hurts because…” usually involve lots of giggles from everyone else. Good luck.
As for testing… yikes. At least the test results are available right away. Back when it took a couple weeks to find out, I could work myself up into a real state of panic and imagine all sorts of things. Including the idea that maybe I’d forgotten some event or that there was some way to contract HIV that we didn’t know about yet and I was the first case. Now, thank God, I can’t get myself that paranoid in just 20 minutes.
I had an operation on my “gluteal cleft” and it was damn annoying. I had to have a polinidal cyst removed. There is nothing worse than having to wear a maxi-pad on your butt because the bleeding was bad…and there is nothing more painfull than sitting on ice because you fell on your incision and began to bleed profusely. My testicles were in my stohmach for a week.
Thanks for sharing Daniel.
And this is when I’m glad you’re a negative person!
Love ya!
:oP
Okay, this is going off on a 90% angle, but there is a connection, honest.
Last year, when my daughter was 16, she was the youth delegate from our church going to Sacramento to lobby for AB 19, the “Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act.”
In conversation with her godfather, she confessed she didn’t really know exactly what she would be doing in Sacramento, and he went off on a long riff which included “buttonholing legistators.”
She didn’t hear him quite correctly, and a terrified look came over her face as she said, “Um… butt moling legislators…?”
It took us about 10 minutes to soothe her concerms because we were laughing too hard to breathe.