From Home Plate brunch to Bagel Basement, Hanover eateries are rife with gossip on Sunday mornings. Topping the list of requisite conversations is who hooked up with whom that weekend. Sometimes the worst thing that could happen is running into your Saturday night snogging partner between 10s and 11s on Monday, but in many cases, there's a lot more at stake.
Three Dartmouth women, whose names have been changed, were willing to discuss their own different experiences with STDs on campus, from coping with having an STD to receiving a false-positive test result to the anxiety of potentially becoming infected.
Jess, a junior, has been part of the campus's HPV study since freshman year. As part of the study, she was given regular blood tests, and tested positive for chlamydia. Jess's results ultimately came back as a false-positive, but the waiting period proved excruciating. "Even though it wasn't my fault I was embarrassed and felt guilty. I wanted to tell people, but I didn't know how they'd respond. I got more and more nervous as time passed," she said.
Jess was also conflicted about telling her boyfriend at the time. "I knew morally I should have told [him] but I didn't know what to say. I avoided doing anything [with him] until the results came back."
The experience has made Jess even more vigilant about getting tested. "Before I thought it was really important to get tested, but now that I've had this experience, I think it's really so important. [At Dartmouth] it's free, so why not? People are silly and kidding themselves if they don't."
Sarah, a senior, was diagnosed with HPV during the break between sophomore summer and junior fall when she went to her yearly gynecological exam. "She was saying I showed a lot of signs of genital warts and this and that and I felt so freaked out." When Sarah got back to school, she went to Dick's House for further tests. "There was evidence that my cervical cells could have been altered and cause them to be precancerous."
Sarah is now in good health, and annoyed that the HPV vaccine didn't come out sooner. "The most ironic part of this is six months after [being diagnosed] Dartmouth started offering the vaccine. You can only do what you can do, and I started getting the vaccine anyway. It gives immunity on four strains [of the virus]."
Sarah found the entire experience to be marked with a certain shame. "Having an STD is very different from having another medical problem," she said. "I felt like I had brought this upon myself because of the choices I had made and that's not right." Still, Sarah found a support system through her boyfriend, friends and the women's health department at Dick's House. "Once I brought up the issue, people were very matter-of-fact about it." Sarah also hoped that if she talked about women's health, it would become less taboo. "I have a friend who became my women's health buddy. She tells me every time she's going to get a Pap smear. It erases the stigma out of it."
Emily, a Dartmouth senior, experienced a scare when she had a random sexual encounter with an ex-boyfriend's friend, something she seldom does. "I ended up going further with him than I normally do with people I've only talked to four times in my life," she said. Emily was not worried at first, but when she got pinkeye, she thought it might be a sign of an STD. Her thoughts immediately turned to the worst possible conclusion. "I was googling 'Can you get AIDS from giving head?' I asked myself, 'Am I seriously googling this?' But I didn't know."
Emily went to Dick's House for an STD check after waiting for three months for any possible infections to show themselves. She had never really thought that Dartmouth students got serious STDs until her own experience. "I asked at Dick's house if anyone had ever tested positive for [HIV] there and [the nurse] was shocked that I would even ask. 'Of course,' she said."
Emily ultimately was given a clean bill of sexual health, but she is now, more than ever, paranoid about infection. "I thought I'd make these mandates [about my sexual behavior] but you can't know anything really. But what are you going to do? Be celibate? That's not a solution."
Between gathering as much knowledge as possible and getting tested frequently, Dartmouth students can lower their risk of carrying an unknown infection. And of course abstinence has its virtues -- it's still the only way to guarantee being entirely STD-free.
