I have reason to believe that someone I was in contact with before using the restroom may have had hiv. I don’t remember touching them but likely touched surfaces they touched like the door handle, tables, pens etc. I worry that any fluid on my hand would only have been 1-2 min old, and that by retrieving my tampon with that finger, I was literally massaging the virus into my cervix/mucus membrane of vagina. As stated, this was ten years ago and I have  no “serious” health issues like swollen glands, thrush, or am I sick a lot. 

I just don’t understand how hiv just becomes not infectious on a surface after an instant. 

Is there a percentage risk? Would my male partner have been sick or have gotten it if I had it for ten years? I have no other exposure. 

I apologize for a follow up and anxiety over this. 

As you also were informed last time, if you had acquired HIV back then, you would be very ill by know and maybe dead. Finally, you might like to know that in the 21 years of this and our preceding forum, with thousands of questions from persons worried about HIV, nobody has yet informed us they tested positive. If and when that finally happens, it will not be a zero risk situation like yours.

You should be tested for HIV. Not because there is any chance you have it, but because it's probably the only way you're going to believe you don't have it. And also consider professional counseling. This level of anxiety is not normal after the repeated, science-based reassurance you have had -- perhaps from your own doctors as well as on our forum. 

Best wishes. Let me know if anything isn't clear.

HHH, MD

Again, thank you for your support. 

As for people who have HIV without knowing the source, all research on this is clear:  almost always there has been a traditional exposure (sexual, needle sharing, etc). The issue isn't that non-intimate contacts spread HIV; it has to do with the fallibility of human memory, intentional or unintentional untruths, and so on. There also can be very potent denial; just think of the person who is absolutely convinced their partner has not had other sexual contacts but in fact is doing so. (One of the very first AIDS patients I knew back in the 1980s was a woman who absolutely had no risks --except she didn't know that for years her husband had been having sex with multiple male partners in San Francisco bath houses. He never admitted it to her and the day of her death a few months after she was diagnosed, she still "knew" it was all a mistake and that the source of her infection remained mysterious. Her husband insisted she not be told and because of medical confidentiality standards her doctors couldn't tell her. If she had been included in one of the reports you refer to, her HIV source would have been recorded as unknown.)

You continue to say nothing about getting tested for HIV. Your apparent resistance to it also increases my concern about underlying psychological issues.

Trust me on this: there is nothing you will think of that has any possibility of changing my evaluation and advice so please do not ask, and do not tell me any more reasons you think you might have HIV. I will be happy to discuss this one more time in a final follow-up comment if you decide to be tested for HIV and would like to tell me the result. But I will have no further comments or advice for you until then.