STDs Are Scary

I am going through a bout of extreme fear over contracting an STD. Any STD would be bad, and of course HIV would be the worst, but right now I am fretting over the idea of herpes. I do not believe I have it, but life would be horrible if I somehow contracted it.

After realizing that my throat has been horrifically inflamed from three consecutive days of deep-throat, uncovered blowjobs with three different men, I am losing it. I do not normally have more than one appointment per week, so this possibility never occurred to me before now. I am going to have to take a break from working (and from fooling around with Robert Redford) until my throat heals.

In the meantime I have nearly been scared straight. I stared down my throat with a flashlight and a hand-mirror for far longer than was good for my mental health. I feel as though I could have seen a lesion, but really it is so hard to distinguish much while you are holding a flashlight with one hand, a mirror with another, and you are saying "ahh" while trying to hold the mirror steady and shine light on all the cracks and crevices deep in your throat, all the while torturing yourself with thoughts of your carelessness and how it could lead to the stigma of, god forbid, an STD.

I will go to the clinic tomorrow, though if I caught anything in the past few days it is almost certainly too early to tell. My throat was probably already severely irritated as of Friday night, and I had oral contact with two other men since then, which only made it worse. I do not allow them to come in my mouth, but today's client oh-so-thoughtfully declined to inform me when he was coming and so I am sure some small bit made it down the hatch. As much as I hate to do it, I will probably be instituting a policy of covered blowjobs (which means: with a condom on), no exceptions.

On top of all this, with last night's client, the condom broke. He did not come inside me, but this is still all too much for me to bear. Perhaps the risks inherent with this job are too extreme for me. Perhaps I need to manage my risks much more carefully.

I am so extremely paranoid right now that I feel as though I should not risk any more sex with strange men, or any men for that matter. A break is definitely in order, though I have to work out how to explain to Robert Redford my sudden reticence at engaging in all things oral. We have two dates scheduled over the next week and while I may be able to explain things away on one night, I cannot for the life of me come up with an innocuous explanation for why I cannot use my mouth for an entire week.