I have been married for almost 15 years, husband and I have a 13 year old child. This timeline is important later.
Last year I found out I have HVP and the presence of enough cancerous cells that I needed to have a biopsy. Though I have not been diagnosed with cancer, I need to have 3-4 checkups annually to keep a close eye on things.
I know HPV is incredibly common, but I don’t know how I could have contracted it unless my husband cheated on me at some point in the last 10-13 years since I was pregnant because I didn’t test positive for it when I was expecting, nor at any of my annual exams for the following three years or so. At some point after my child was a few years old, my doctor stopped including STI screenings in my regularly scheduled exams because I had never tested positive, had never had an abnormal pap, and told her my marriage was 100% monogamous.
If neither of us has cheated, how did I contract HPV some 15 years or more into our relationship? Is there any possibility it was dormant since my early 20s when we started dating?
Additional background:
* My husband and I were tested together when we first started dating. No issues on either side.
* I’ve had 5+ STI tests since, in the early years and until my doctor stopped screening for STIs and never had an issue
* I am 100% certain I have never cheated
* My husband used to drink and when he did, his behavior was reckless, unpredictable, and sometimes unaccounted for (i.e. he would pass out at friends’ houses and not come home until morning – I had no idea where he was and he often couldn’t recall much of the night when he finally stumbled home). In the first 10 years of our relationship when he was still drinking, I caught him coming on to women on 2 occasions. One of the times he was mad at me and tried to pick up a woman at a bar I was at. He was so awfully inappropriate with her that he was kicked out of the bar and beat up by the bouncer. I don’t know many of the details as to what he did or said to her, just that she told me he said ‘disgusting shit’ to her. He has maintained that he has no recollection of that night, and when he woke up the next day he didn’t even know why he was beaten up.
17 comments
I think you will need a physician to answer this. Even then you may get different answers. A quick search leads me to credible sources that say that HPV can lie dormant for years or even decades. I also found credible sources that say that STi screening usually doesn’t include herpes or HPV. HPV is incredibly common and often goes away on it’s own. I believe part of the reason they don’t test for it is because it is incredibly common.
Ask a doctor about this, but there are 2 kinds of HPV.
One is the cervical cancer kind that you get from sex. The other one causes common warts that you can get from a door handle.
Ask a doctor because I don’t know if the wart kind shows up in blood tests or if the other kind spreads any other ways.
Without going into too much detail, HPV can lay dormant for years or decades before showing any symptoms and does not necesarily have to be contracted through sexual contact. In my case, HPV was not contracted through sexual contact and lay dormant until I turned 19 by which time it developed into quite a nasty disease.
I think you answered your own question with your edit…sounds like he cheated at some point with all of this magically lost time
Probably worth asking if they can check with your previous 5+ screenings whether HPV was on there.
It’s really common to not include it in screenings, just because of how common it is.
You’ve also got the fact that it’s not always picked up with screenings.
And it can also lie dormant for, in some cases, decades.
Tough one OP, maybe ask him about it and gauge his reaction?
His face should say it all when confronted with something like this.
HPV is transferred by skin contact, which while generally is of a sexual nature is not exclusively
There is no way to know when you contracted HPV. HPV is not tested on a routine STI panel along with gonorrhea and chlamydia. Your partner would not be checking HPV as well unless his testing is a urethral swab (ouch). You probably contracted HPV prior to meeting your partner and it never caused any issues until now. Or your partner contracted HPV before meeting you and transmission only occurred after some time. Or he cheated on you. Any one of those scenarios is possible. I’ve seen marriages dissolve because patients did not understand that HPV positivity does not equal cheating. Feel free to talk to your GYN about this in more depth.
HPV can be dormant for years. You could have had it before you met him.
You dont test positive until you do. So until your pap reveals abnormal cells, you’ll be labeled as not having HPV.
You couldve gotten it when you were 16 and just now having symptoms.
You need a straight answer from the doctor. If they won’t give it to you find one that will
Previously pap smears just tested for abnormal cells, not HPV. Its only in the last few years or so they’ve moved to testing for HPV. So I would check if you’ve been tested for HPV before, or just for abnormal cells or other STDs
Have you specifically had HPV testing in the past with your Pap smear? Many doctors and clinics have only recently started testing for HPV along with the Pap smear. Also until 2019 it was only recommended to co-test for HPV for women over 30, so if you were younger than that with your last Pap, it may not have been tested for, so it may have been there for years and just never identified.
You’ve been living with an alcoholic from over a decade, one who drinks so much he blacks out and can’t remember what happened. Who does that? Even if he’s now sober, you still were married to him during his black out days and had sex with him. What? He gets tossed out of bars and beaten by a bouncer, probably because he refused to leave, and you stayed married. What? He tries to pick up a woman at a bar in front of you and you’re still married. What?
I mean it sounds like he could have cheated 🤷
That’s a higher possibility than the other option.
I’m assuming you’ve asked him if he ever cheated. What was his response and what was his body language? Trust your instincts, they are usually right
For things like HPV it is possible that it wasn’t detected and he didn’t cheat on you….
But is it probable? That is a question for a doctor or a specialist.
>my doctor stopped including STI screenings in my regularly scheduled exams because I had never tested positive, had never had an abnormal pap
There’s no additional screening for HPV. You can only get it through PAP and only once there are irregularities. You could have had HPV for a long time, just was dormant, and now it developed into “cancerous” cells (cancerous is not the right word, but it’s irregular). You don’t *necessarily* get a bad PAP result immediately or closer to when you had sex with someone who had HPV. It can just be there and then suddenly it turns into something, and the PAP is irregular. Then, they have to do a biopsy.
For instance, my grandma had an irregular pap smear when she was in her late 60s or early 70s and I don’t think she was thinking my grandfather cheat since he was almost 10 years older (and I don’t even know when the last time they had sex was lol). In the end, she had uterine cancer, had surgery, and then she was fine.
>how did I contract HPV some 15 years or more into our relationship?
There’s no test for men. Unless they have a wart, it’s impossible to test. So it’s possible you had it all along or that he did cheat. Both are possible answers.
That’s just my personal knowledge from my own experience and all the research I’ve done. I’m not a doctor.