Risk of STI Reinfection

[nyxoxo]

heylo! i was wondering if you guys could help me out with a situation i’m in. recently i’ve been seeing someone new since my breakup and it’s been going well, however about two weeks ago (october 27th) he informed me that he’d been experiencing symptoms such as burning and itching, so he got tested and his results came back positive for gonorrhea. he said he’d had a risk a few weeks before we started seeing each other and that might’ve been when he’d contracted it. (i totally understood and we’d had a really mature and understanding conversation about it ) anyway, i went to my doctor and got tested/received my antibiotics (i tested positive too, which was to be expected). my dose was 7 days of doxycycline twice a day with an injection as well, and his was a 10 day treatment of doxycycline with an injection. i finished my treatment last week, and he finished his medication yesterday morning. anyway, i spent this weekend at his house, and after we’d gotten done smoking on friday the both of us started getting a little handsy (we knew we shouldn’t have sex until a week after the treatment was over but we used a condom just to be on the safe side regardless). while we were having sex the condom broke, but he wasn’t close to cumming whatsoever, and we stopped having sex about a minute after it broke since we didn’t realize it straight away. i’m having some major anxiety about potential reinfection since the initial appointment was embarrassing enough

my question is, should i go and get retreated immediately or just wait until my next retest date/any symptoms arise, and get retested then? is there a chance we may have gotten lucky enough to not have reinfected each other? any help or advice would be so so appreciated. thanks for reading!

[Sam W]

Hi nyxoxo,

So, since you'd already finished your treatment last week, the odds are extremely low that you still had it and passed it back to him. It's a little trickier with his potential of passing it to you, since he only finished it yesterday and the recommendation with longer courses of gonorrhea treatment is to wait until you're done with the whole thing before having sex. And the condom breaking does mean there was an exposure risk, even if he hadn't ejaculated yet.

What I'd recommend is to contact your healthcare provider (or he can contact his) and explain the situation, since they'll be able to give you a more accurate assessment of your risks based on the specifics of your treatment.