DrunkenBlog

To Colby, who has been on my mind

A year ago, when the blog was even more confused about its identity than it is now, I posted a short entry on a promising new HPV vaccine that was in testing and seemed to be remarkably effective.

About four months ago, Colby Cooper left this comment on the entry...

I just found out today that I have HPV. I need to know more about it, I thought I had the starting stages of cancer but thank God I don't.

I'm still in shock that I have HPV and would like to know all there is to know about it. I think it would make it easier on me to come to terms and at peace with myself if I knew more about it. I have been very upset all day and I am also very scared.

The thing that upsets me the most is when the time comes and I meet that right man that I fall in love with and decide I want to spend the rest of my life with, I will have to tell him about the biggest mistake I made at a young age.

I would like to know more about HPV so I can make amends with myself and move on.

Colby doesn't know this, but for a good month he randomly popped into my thoughts almost every day, and his comment was in the back of my mind while I was writing the last section of 'Rumble Young Man, Rumble'.

As the months have gone by his comment keeps floating across my thoughts, although the frequency gap is starting to widen, which is why I'm writing this now.

The thing is, I know next to nothing about Colby, but I can put together how that comment came to be in my head. I can imagine Colby being diagnosed and trying to come to grips mentally with the repercussions for his future, and coming home and googling for any information on it he can find. Due to my page rank, he stumbled across my old entry.

When something traumatic happens outside of our control, people have different ways of dealing with it. Some deal by pushing it out of their head, and some deal by trying to learn as much about what's impacting their lives as possible. Colby strikes me as the latter type, but while I'm sure Colby really did want as much information as he could, his words ring with much more than that.

What struck me so deeply about Colby's comment is just how emotionally raw and desperate it is. This wasn't just a request for more information, this was also a (hopefully) cathartic release into the internet ether of everything that had been racing through his mind since he'd been diagnosed earlier in the day.

I'll admit I've had to be there for more than one friend when they found out they had it, so I've done my own share of googling.

If you're curious about what HPV is, it's a sexually transmitted virus, and is short for Human Papilloma Virus. It's incredibly wide-spread, and while it can be treated, it can't be cured. It's easy to transmit, and has a long incubation period -- someone can be infectious for years and years with no idea that they have something.

For men, they usually find out when they start getting these warts and decide to have them checked out. For women, a huge amount of them get the bad news after having a routine Pap test at their gynecologist.

When it comes to damage, men generally have a better time than women. Women are just screwed when it comes to HPV. While there is a strain that can cause oral cancers in both, especially with catalysts, depending on who you ask HPV is responsible for two-thirds or 95% of all cases of cervical cancer. Cervical cancer is pretty life-changing stuff, not to mention deadly.

The infection rates of HPV in 20-somethings is just frightening to say the least, and since cervical cancer doesn't really hit until your 30s, HPV is going to be making a big name for itself in the not-too-distant-future.

It doesn't mean that it doesn't already have a name, as all the TV commercials for treatments (the 'outbreaks' of warts can be treated) attest -- but those are pretty much geared towards people who have it. However there's been little done to educate the public on it, and most people are ignorant about it.

One of the big things about HPV that completely freaked me out when I learned it, simply because I didn't know it and I thought I was up on things, was that safe sex doesn't really exist when it comes to HPV. The thing about 'safe sex' is that the concept primarily came about during the HIV scare. Syphilis spores can be eradicated now, as can most STDs, but HIV was fatal and that thin layer of latex means a lot.

Sometime I'll write about my experiences volunteering in an AIDs hospice one summer, but suffice to say I've seen what HIV can do. Condoms are really important, as is knowing your parter(s), as is regular testing (there's an incubation period with HIV too, either while its multiplying or dormant, and one test doesn't mean you're clean) -- but at the end of the day, condoms don't really do much against HPV.

HPV is spread through general genital contact -- basically all the parts that the condom doesn't cover that are bumping together during sex -- and there are many strains (there are over 80 total floating around) that are spread orally, some which are both.

Oral sex is safe sex to many people, and finding out that they've contracted a highly infectious and incurable STD from it probably surprises each and every one of them, although enough time has usually passed that they have no clue how they actually got it.

Some of you reading this may have known some of this stuff, but I'd wager many didn't, and you're not alone.

It may or may not be obvious by reading the blog, but I'm generally pretty interested in why things are they way they are. Technology, sociology, economics, piracy, warez, forms of art, drugs, eating disorders, sex, and even prostitution are all fair game on the interest scale.

That's how you build up and broaden your frame of reference, and how you have a better shot of being able to recognize patterns in what you're seeing instead of seeing what you hope to see. It's pretty much the gist of the tagline of the site: "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

We're designed to make out edges in what we see, and then match those edges and lines to patterns stored in our brain. If one stares at a cloud long enough, or the grain in a piece of wood, patterns start to appear. If you ask 100 people what shapes they see and you'll get a whole variety of answers, depending on what they've experienced and what they have in their brain to cross-reference.

Awhile ago I spent about a year living in Las Vegas while doing some work for some companies who were involved in some of the hotels. Due to what we were doing it was often easier to just shuffle us around to wherever there were vacancies rather than some corporate apartment. I'll save those stories for another day, but when you spend enough time in one of these places you learn things.

It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that the casino bars, even at the really high end hotels (and in some cases there are higher ratios there), are pretty well seeded with 'escorts', and where they're not they're a phone call away. Parts of Nevada are really the only place in the USA where you can find legal prostitution, and with it things like mandatory testing and records.

There are all kinds of legal and moral issues that start popping up whenever you raise this subject -- but I'm taking the easy way out and saying that for the purposes of this, I don't really care. I'm not saying they're not important issues that shouldn't be discussed, but rather that you can't have a real discussion with someone if they feel they're being judged.

People clam up when approached that way, as any information they give you is just more ammunition to be turned back on them, but when you're really just trying to learn how something happened and is the way it is, you'd be surprised at how open people can be.

Let's assume for a moment that being an escort is a profession of sorts -- it certainly has many of the hallmarks of one. I think what wigged me out in some of my conversations with them was just how few were even aware of HPV and how it was transmitted, let alone the future consequences.

When you add in the fact that many on the 'low end' of the chain aren't exactly getting their regular checkups, and hence aren't even aware they're infected... When most escorts aren't really aware of it I don't find it that surprising that the rest of the public knows as little as they do.

I never responded to Colby's message, because I kept trying to figure out what I'd actually say. It really tripped up my brain in a way, as it raises all sorts of issues that are so deserving of deeper thought.

The lack of public education on the subject, the increasing role of the internet as a research tool for the public, whether things like prostitution should be legalized for the regulation aspects alone, or how we deal with watching the path of our life change a few sentences into a phone call.

Another that comes to mind is the choice someone like Colby is faced with in having to carry something like that around, and knowing that whenever they become involved enough with someone that they need to tell them their secret, they're risking it ending.

You might be surprised at how many people find ways to rationalize 'forgetting' that they got a piece of paper from the doctor that said they tested positive -- I certainly was -- simply because the implications for their future are more than they can or are willing to cope with.

All I have is the email address he left with his words, and Colby will probably never know that his message in a bottle actually floated across the internet and made it to someone's ear, let alone how often he's been in my thoughts.

Somewhere in there is probably a microcosm of both the best and the worst of what the internet offers the world. Wherever Colby Cooper is, and whoever he is, I hope he's coping, and I hope he's OK.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    March 06, 2005, at 02:39 AM