When evaluating the results of an antibody test, I take lots of things into consideration
1) the nature of the sexual exposure causing the concern
2) the timing of the test in relationship to the experience
3) past sexual history, prior to the encounter in question
So first, your sexual experience did not put you at risk for HSV 2. From what you’ve written, you did not give her oral sex, she just gave you oral sex, right? So the risk of getting HSV 2 from receiving oral sex is very close to zero, even on the odd chance that she had HSV 2 orally, which is very unlikely. In fact, both of her index values fall into the low positive range so either or both could be false positives.
The timing of having your most recent test drawn at 18.5 weeks is right. Add the extremely low risk of acquiring HSV 2 from oral sex to the correct timing, I seriously doubt that you are seroconverting at this time. There would be zero benefit taking an IgG or Biokit test at this point.
You don’t mention anything about your past sexual history so I don’t know if you’ve had a recent contact before this, have ever been tested for herpes before, or have had any contact since.
No, I have never in 32 years of practice seen anyone acquire HSV 2 genitally be receiving oral sex from someone. Never.
The indeterminate western blot thing is troubling; we are seeing more than we used to on western blots, perhaps because we are sending all low positives for western blot now and that’s the main why we use the western blot. So whatever may be artificially tripping the ELISA test is also causing the western blot to look like it might have a band or two that look like herpes, but not enough to call it positive. It is certainly possible that there is a protein in some people’s body that is the same as one of the herpes antibody proteins that is causing this. We’ll be doing a study this summer, asking for blood from people who have had an indeterminate western blot to look at testing in a different way to see what we get.
If you had had the blot done years ago, it might look just like it looks now. Who knows. You could certainly repeat it in six months, but my guess is, it will look exactly the same. Nothing in the sexual experience that you describe sounds worrisome for contracting HSV 2. If you were my in-person patient, I would say that you are likely NOT Infected. The EXPOSURE just doesn’t fit with new infection, nor the testing.
I doubt that having them look at this blot again would be of any help. Three people have read the blot already, that happens every time. If you do have your bloods drawn again, be certain that you give them the date of the first draw so they can compare the two, that is often useful.
Terri