General questions

Condom broke. What is the order of things to do?

Happened last night. I am spiralling a bit and I cannot work out what is urgent and what can wait until the morning.

plain_paper 3 months ago

NoteMember experience, not medical advice. Symptoms overlap between infections and only a test can tell them apart.

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short_wave 3 months ago

Everything else can wait, and in fact has to. Testing immediately after an exposure mostly tells you about your status beforehand, because nothing has had time to become detectable yet.

So the sequence is: anything urgent today, then a test at the interval the clinic gives you, then a second one later for the things with longer windows.

northwindow 3 months ago

The genuinely time critical item is HIV post exposure prophylaxis if the situation warrants it, and that window is measured in hours rather than days. If that is a possibility, contact a sexual health service or an emergency department now rather than tomorrow.

Emergency contraception, if relevant, is the other thing that gets better the sooner it happens.

oak_table 3 months ago

Write down the date while you remember it. Every clinic conversation from here starts with when it happened, and by week three people are guessing.

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