Chlamydia Ain't a Bitch
BY ANONYMOUS
At the tail-end of Fall Welcome Week 2018, I had begun “talking” with this guy with whom I had plenty of mutual friends. He was without a doubt one of the friendliest people I had ever met, in addition to being ridiculously good-looking. I had reasonably fair suspicions that he was the type of guy to “get around”, but it was all hearsay. Plus, I never intended on dating this kid, so I didn’t really care. We ended up talking every single day until he eventually invited me over to his room to hang out on a Wednesday night. I got there at one in the morning (prime booty call hours), and we proceeded to chat for a while until he took me into his bedroom.
It started with foreplay and ultimately it got to the point where we were both naked. That was all fun and games until the dude tried putting his penis inside of me without a condom. I immediately pushed him off of me and told him to put a condom on, to which he agreed. I wasn’t mad at the time; I understood that he wanted to shoot his shot. The sex was fine. However, two major red flags popped up afterward when we were “pillow-talking” and he was adamantly refusing to tell me how many people he had hooked up with in the past, and telling me that he would never speak to me ever again if I told anyone we had hooked up. I thought it was off, but I didn’t take him that seriously. A few weeks later, we hung out again. This time, there was minimal conversation and we went straight into hooking up. Afterward, I told him I was going to pee so that I could avoid a urinary tract infection, as one does. He told me I wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom because his suitemates were home, and he didn’t want them knowing he was hooking up with someone. Knowing I couldn’t wait too long before peeing in order to avoid a UTI, I demanded I go back to my suite to pee there, but he told me I wasn’t allowed to leave his room until he knew his suitemates were asleep. It ended up taking around an hour before I was able to go to the bathroom. Due to the extended period of time before I was allowed to pee, I initially attributed my symptoms to possibly being a UTI. The symptoms popped up around a week after the second time we had sex, but they didn’t feel like UTI symptoms. Yes, I had frequent urination and burning while peeing, but also itchiness pervaded throughout the entire area, which had never happened to me during a UTI. I also had periodic cramps in my pelvic area which felt similar to that of menstrual cramps. It didn’t feel severe, it just felt...off. I thought the symptoms would subside, but after a week I decided that I should probably get tested. I drove over to an urgent care, and they tested me for a UTI, chlamydia, gonorrhea, trichomoniasis, etc. Despite my abnormal symptoms, I was in denial of the fact that I could possibly have an STI. When my phone rang one week later, I received the news that I had chlamydia. Immediately, my mind was plagued with thoughts about how I was dirty and disgusting. I had an STI, one of those scary yet ambiguous pathogens that my health teacher told me to stay away from. I learned about all of the ways of avoiding them but never what to do when I actually ended up with one. And on top of that, it was chlamydia. I remember in middle school health class laughing about how funny the name was, knowing I would never ever get one because I was invincible, but yet, here I was. Promptly after finding out about my diagnosis, I invited over the guy that presumably gave me chlamydia. Upon telling him, he started crying, thinking that I was never going to be able to have children, get pregnant, or that my children would automatically be born with chlamydia. I think that is a perfect example of how misunderstood chlamydia is. Chlamydia is a short-term, easily treatable bacterial infection, and I was able to cure myself of the infection after a one-week round of doxycycline antibiotics. I would’ve been able to do it by taking four azithromycin pills in one sitting if I wasn’t allergic. One sitting! And I was really out here thinking my entire life that chlamydia was the worst thing in the entire world. I have had colds that lasted longer than my chlamydia. Now obviously I’m not saying that you should be absolutely content with getting chlamydia and stop bothering to use condoms due to how easy it is to cure. There are obviously other STDs and STIs that have far more serious ramifications for your health. All I’m saying is that there are a few myths about chlamydia that I believed my entire life which I ultimately found out to be extremely false:
The one thing that I hope you can take from this piece is the importance of getting tested. Although it didn’t feel like it at the time, it was a blessing that I experienced symptoms of chlamydia so soon after obtaining the infection. Chlamydia and other STIs can be asymptomatic, so you may feel like you don’t have to get tested. As I learned from the boy who gave me chlamydia, this is not the case, and you can still transmit an STI even when you are not exhibiting symptoms. Moral of the story: please get tested. |