• ABOUT
• CONTACT
• SUBSCRIBE
• HOME

Monday, February 5, 2007

HOW TO: Get Vaccinated Against Herpes (Maybe)

filed under: HOW TO:, Smart. Safe. Sex. by Lux Nightmare

I found out about the herpes vaccine during the summer of 2004. A friend – a medical school student – posted about it in her blog, and since I was a sex nerd and seemed to fit the requirements, I called up Mt. Sinai and scheduled an appointment to be screened for the study.

The requirements, at the time that I enrolled in the study, were relatively simple. I had to:

1) Be female
2) Be herpes free (both oral and genital)
3) Not have been vaccinated against hepatitis A (as the vaccine would be used on the control group)

There was also some stuff about not getting pregnant and staying in New York for the next twenty months: trivial stuff, the kind of stuff I knew wouldn’t be a problem.

So I went to Mt. Sinai, to the OB/GYN department. I walked past security, took the elevator to the second floor, and walked through the waiting room, back into the small office decorated with posters advertising the study. The posters featured women of a variety of ages and races, coupled with statistics about the virus, about how you could make a difference by enrolling in this study.

25% of American women have genital herpes.

60% of American women have oral herpes.

If I qualified for the study, I would be in the minority of American women. If I enrolled in the study, I could make a difference in the lives of future generations.

The doctor – a pretty, relatively young woman – sat me down and asked me a few questions.

No, I had never received the hepatitis vaccine.

No, I was not planning on getting pregnant.

No, I had never had herpes. “At least, not to my knowledge,” I said, acknowledging that I could have contracted a case of “secret herpes.” (As most people who have herpes don’t know about it, this didn’t seem too outrageous. But the doctor didn’t seem to share my sense of humor.

She took me back into the examination room, and began the process that would become familiar, standard, over the next twenty months.

First I peed into a cup, so she could give me a pregnancy test.

Then she drew my blood: several vials, for different types of tests.

A few days later I got a phone call: I was cleared for participation in the study.

So I went back and got my first shot.

The herpes vaccine – like many vaccines, including the now FDA-approved HPV vaccine – is given in three doses: one at 0 months, one at 2 months, and one at six months.

The first time they gave me a shot – in my arm, in the muscle – I could feel the muscles spasm and clench around the needle. My arm hurt for several days, but other than that I felt fine.

For posterity, for research, I had to spend the following week taking my temperature every night, with the small plastic thermometer provided by Mt. Sinai. Every night I had to inspect the injection site, making sure it wasn’t too red, too irritated, or somehow infected. At the end of the week I would email my observations in to the study facilitators.

A month later I was back, this time to get some bloodwork done, to see if the antibodies to herpes were taking hold in my bloodstream. This time they drew six vials, instead of three, half of which were labeled with pretty green caps instead of the standard red. The green-capped vials had a slower pull, and seemed to take an eternity to fill up.

Whenever I would tell people that I was in a herpes vaccine trial, they would inevitably ask me the same question: “So what do they do, give you the vaccine and then inject you with herpes?”

In a word, no.

What they did was this: they gave me a vaccine (either herpes or hepatitis A, the exact content unknown to both myself and the hospital staff), and then they told me to live my life. They asked me to report on side effects, they drew my blood, and periodically they would give me a questionnaire to fill out, a brief survey mapping out my sexual history over the course of the study.

It was the survey that was my favorite part. It was very brief, and very specific, asking about the number of partners I’d had between visits, as well as the number of new partners, the number of times I’d had sex, the number of times I’d had unprotected sex, and whether I’d engaged in anal, manual, oral, or vaginal stimulation.

Filling out the study helped me keep tabs on what was going on in my personal life: helped me see, concretely, the evolution of my sexual sphere. When I entered the study, I was fresh out of a long term relationship, over the course of the twenty months I had several partners, one serious relationship, and several periods of situational celibacy.

I came to appreciate, to value the visits: they were a regular part of my life, a nice little ritual to measure out the passage of time.

As my time in the study wore on, the visits were scheduled further apart, with email updates being sent in the intervening months, to keep tabs on me and my whereabouts, to make sure I was still okay and unharmed by the vaccine.

And then, in early 2006, approximately twenty months after my first shot, I went in for my last visit.

They drew my blood, just like always, and told me they would keep in touch: even though I was done with the study, even though my twenty months were up, more and more women were still being enrolled in the study, more women were needed to get the levels up to the required numbers, and the study could not be unblinded until all those women had completed their twenty months in the study.

In other words: I would not know whether I had received the vaccine for at least another two years, and likely more.

So they’d keep in touch, they said, keep tabs on me so that when the day came they could let me know which group I’d been in, so that they could offer me the herpes vaccine if I’d been in the control group (a small token of their appreciation for my efforts, let’s say).

That would have been the end of it. This would have been a story of a vaccine trial that ended quietly, anticlimactically, with me waiting – still waiting – for an answer.

Except for the fact that my sister moved to India, and I bought a ticket to go visit her, and travel to India requires several vaccines, including: hepatitis A.

When I went in for my vaccination visit, I told my doctor that I was unsure whether or not I’d been vaccinated against hepatitis A – that it was possible that I’d received the vaccine in this study, but also possible that I hadn’t.

She agreed to do some bloodwork, to test for the antibodies.

A week later, I got a call from her office. I was not immune to hepatitis A.

I still don’t know when the study will be unblinded, but when the call does come, I expect to be pleasantly unsurprised.

The Herpevac trial is still enrolling women. For more information, please go to the Herpevac site.

Comments