It sounds like herpes is really making your life pretty miserable.
Can we step back just a minute and fill me in on how this happened to you? Have you recently had a new partner? How were you diagnosed with herpes?
You’ve had herpes for about nine months now and have been taking daily medication, I would expect that it would be settling down a little by now. Sometimes, people have nerve irritation that persists beyond the actual blisters and that’s what I think is going on with you. In addition, you have lots of worries about your children and infecting them, so let’s talk about that first.
This is a sexually transmitted infection. It is NOT transmissible through normal household contacts such as those that you have described. Also, when we think about viral shedding, that occurs in the genital area (including the anal area) only – the skin of the thigh and the buttocks and belly are too thick for virus to come off of them and be “shed” without an obvious lesion or sore. Shedding only occurs from skin that is very thin, like the labia is thin. The same thing that makes sex fun, lots of nerve endings close to the surface to the skin and easily stimulated, also allows for viral shedding.
The episode that you describe of thigh itching presented no risk to your child at all. Now it is possible to get lesions on the thigh, blisters, but if you have no blisters, you are not shedding virus from that area.
If you touch the genital area, and are worried about shedding, simply wash your hands before leaving the bathroom, and only once, not three times.
When you say you’ve had outbreaks every month but no blisters, that’s confusing, can you clarify that?
Is the 500 mg of Valtrex three times a day helping you?
In summary, just for now, you are no where near as infectious as you think you are. Your children are at no risk from you. I have never, in 32 years of practice, seen or heard of someone with genital herpes infecting their child.
If you could answer my questions, that would be great.
I’m out of the country lecturing, but I will try to answer you as soon as I can; we are on opposite time schedules from each other.
Terri