I know quite a bit about HIV and many people who have it (including a few dudes in my city who were diagnosed in the 80s/early 90s and are still kicking even after years without meds in the earlier days of the epidemic). It is utterly impossible for you to have been infected this way.
There is absolutely ZERO risk.
I'll give you the long version just this once so you can never worry about this again.
HIV is actually a
very difficult virus to catch. It's rendered unable to infect within a fraction of being exposed to the air (people like to debate whether it's technically still alive or dead after minutes or hours, but it doesn't matter because it literally cannot infect anyone within a fraction of a second). Scientists have a very difficult time studying the virus in even the strictest laboratory settings for this reason. I used to live 0.1 miles away from the biggest testing/educational center in one of the largest gay communities in the world where statistically 1 out of 5 had HIV. They pushed this information hard and often had free testing buses on the streets. I saw many risky activities occur
(your situation is not considered even the slightest bit of a risk) without PrEP or PEP antivirals to prevention infection; if it were this simple to get HIV, we'd all have it by now. Why don't we? I'll quote the HIV forums I've referenced before:
HIV is a fragile, difficult to transmit virus that is primarily transmitted INSIDE the human body, as in unprotected anal or vaginal intercourse where the virus never leaves the confines of the two bodies.
Once outside the body, small changes in temperature, and pH and moisture levels all quickly damage the virus and render it unable to infect. For this reason, even if he did have a small amount of his own blood on his hand, it would NOT be a risk to you. In adults, HIV is transmitted through:
- Unprotected anal intercourse.
- Unprotected vaginal intercourse.
- Sharing drug injecting equipment.
And that's IT.
This is because biologically, four conditions need to be present for transmission to occur: The virus must be present in an infectious body fluid from the HIV positive person, it must be present at sufficient levels to cause infection. There must be an effective route of transmission, and it must reach susceptible cells in another person.
Anyone who is sexually active should be having a full sexual health care check-up, including but not limited to HIV testing, at least once a year and more often if unprotected intercourse occurs.
If you keep reading online long enough you will find people who think ET an alien from out of space is a true HIV risk
... catch my drift. Stop looking online for an issue you do not have.
Now,
@NameK, you do not want to develop a phobia of HIV. You aren't going to get it unless you have a serious exposure that's included in the bulleted list above. Anything else is either not a risk or a theoretical risk that's of no concern to you. Example = you are certainly not going up to a man who just chopped his finger off and instead of going to the ER, he directly inserts his bloody stump into a deep gash on your arm that is actively bleeding large quantities of blood and requires stitches because it ripped down to your bone. And if for some reason you lost your mind and did just that, you'd be given PEP antivirals within 72 hours of infection, which is highly effective at preventing the contraction of HIV when a legitimate risk has occurred. And believe it or not, even this isn't a guaranteed transmission, as both of your wounds would be outpouring blood so quickly and intensely, it's not 100% certain enough of that other person's virus would be able to enter your bloodstream. It would also depend on their viral load; if they are undetectable from medication, there is zero risk.
What this means is that if you ever touch a spot of blood in a public bathroom stall, it can't infect you. There is no risk for a number of reasons, as stated above. Also, kissing isn't a cause of HIV, because saliva renders the any blood from another person's mouth unable to infect (unless you hit their mouth with a hammer, removed all their teeth, and sucked on their bleeding mouth while you had a deep, open, and bloody oral wound. Again, this will never happen to you).
Your situation met none of the biological requirements for transmission. The science behind HIV transmissions has greatly changed since the epidemic's early days when people believed it was much easier to contract.
Do not Google HIV. Fortunately, the awareness around HIV transmission is much better these days, but the internet is not your friend when it comes to looking up HIV because there is still so much hysteria around it (and people aren't always honest about how they've contracted it due to shame, sometimes people were under the influence and can't clearly recall important details, etc.).
I never understood why the moderators on the HIV forum would say stress can cause all kinds of serious symptoms, including fevers, chills, swollen lymph nodes, joint pain, etc. As a member of TMS Wiki, I get that now.
