All clear

As it often goes, the test was a false alarm. It's not surprising, of course. It's relieving, of course.

I read online that only .002 percent of people taking this test have the first false positive and then an indeterminate on the second (different) test.

That's not a lot of people. So when you tell your best girlfriend about it and they say "hmm. I've never heard of that," You start to wonder yourself if the results were positive.

But they weren't. Tuesday, I let them suck away 2 more vials of blood from my arm, one of which was more a vat than a vial. They said they'd send the lab tests away at 10:00 AM. At 11:00 AM, I started checking my email for a published result.  Imagine my blood whirling around the PCR, searching for 4 nucleic acids that shouldn't be there.
Imagine. Imagine.

The results didn't come on Tuesday and of course everything was closed Wednesday. They didn't come on Thursday, though I sent a message to the nurse practitioner asking for them. They didn't come on Friday, either, until 4:10 PM, where we were called back to the office, had my height and weight and blood pressure taken. Boom. She mentioned it right away, a false positive. The PCR said negative. The advanced clinic says you have nothing to worry about.

Such a test looks for 3 antibodies to prove you have the illness--and I was high on one of them.  From what I read online, I didn't want it to be band 24, because that's an early sign of seroconversion. It means that you have the disease but your body hasn't released it yet or quite figured it out yet.

I wasn't high on band 24, it was just a falsey false positive.

Then we did some of the other things I was hoping to do at the doctor's office.  I do not have HIV--but you can see how scared you might be if your result came back positive.
I don't have any other STDs, either, which really comes at no surprise.

Last week I was thinking "please god, give me ANYTHING else but HIV." There are no atheists in foxholes, let me tell you.