Reply To: Primary Outbreak Mild Symptoms Autoinnoculate

[Mild Symptoms]

I should’ve mentioned earlier that there are small ovular bubbles visible under the fingers in my skin. I initially suspected that it was herpes because, although I had not developed any visible blisters that I was aware of, the patterns in my skin look very consistent with the appearance of the skin that is not part of the erythmatic base on images of herpetic whitlow that I’ve looked up online. I realize that my symptoms don’t appear to be traditional herpes because they are avowedly not painful and have not yet turned into large blisters. There is a slightly uncomfortable tingling sensation in one of my effected thumbs this morning and on closer examination there appears to be a flat blister on that thumb underneath the thumbnail, spreading out beneath that is a cluster of “vesicles” that are reddish-purplish and upraised from the skin. I think that I am in the early stages of having an outbreak.

I also should’ve mentioned that the red spot on my penis has since turned pink and more or less faded back into the skin, the larger spot on my glans has remained as it first presented although it is increasing difficult to see. The skin on my fingers and penis is behaving differently than the skin on the rest of my body. Everywhere else it appears on my body it looks like pink or white groupings of skin, most prominently visible when there are red or dark dots in the centers of the symptoms to which I was earlier referring as vesicles. There are other spots on my skin where they just appear to be contiguous patterns of white or pink skin.

I have also not had a fever or any other typical signs that my body is reacting to a viral infection, with the exception of a sore neck for a couple days which I assume could just as easily be attributed to how I slept. What if my body just hasn’t had a serious immune response yet and has therefore not produced anti-virals that would force the virus into blisters.

I have not had cold sores before, although it’s possible that I have had HSV1 for a long time and not known about it. My current girlfriend (with whom I am in an open relationship) tested herself when I began describing what I was experiencing, and she came back with a low-positive for HSV1, we are doing long distance and seeing other people so we have not had any contact since this began.

The person with whom I had sex took a blood test a couple weeks later which she said came back as normal, however she’s very sexually active and has had something like 10> partners over the last year. I know that it would be a limit case, but it seems possible that she slipped into the 10-20% of cases that come back false negative, or that she hasn’t sufficiently serroconverted from her last encounter which was about 7 weeks before we had sex.

How extensive can auto-innoculation be?

If I have infected my fingers as well, will I shed asymptomatically from them the same way I would from my genitals?

You’ve said that it wouldn’t normally be painless, since so many people don’t know they have herpes, couldn’t it just be that many people experience the symptoms painlessly and practictioners have a selection bias in which they are so used to it being associated with the 20% of the people that come to the clinic with painful symptoms that they have a hard time recognizing the cases in which it does present atypically/painlessly?

Couldn’t the absence of blisters just mean that my body is taking longer than normal to develop an auto-immune response and that in 2 weeks my hands/genitals are going to be covered in blisters?