I would say last night's little birthday bash was a resounding success. I have a hangover from hell today, combined with an incoming sinus infection. I woke up at 3:30 this a.m., my lips chapped, and my throat sticky and sore. I'm also pretty sure my glands were a bit swollen.
Every time this happens, I'm just positive that I have the AIDS. Never fails. That's the first thing that pops into my head. Swollen glands (although they probably weren't even really swollen; I was just imagining it) and a sore throat (although that's just from sleeping with my mouth open and nasal drip). Mmm...nasal drip.
Then my second thought after that was that I don't think my first drink at the bar was ever paid for. Although much of last night is just a blur, as I was far more drunk than any 31-year-old needs to be. I do vividly remember, however, Laura taking one look at my new haircut and asking me if I was already having a mid-life crisis. Which of course was the funniest thing I'd ever heard, because pretty much everything Laura says is the funniest thing I've ever heard.
In my sexuality class this past week I heard a statistic that was something like, if you've sucked more than 5 dicks in your life, you have a 250% higher chance of getting throat cancer than someone who hasn't sucked 5 dicks.
Which I'm sure is a ridiculous and mostly made-up statistic, but I would really, really love to hear how they came to that conclusion (no pun intended). I mean, if you've only sucked 4 dicks are you still okay, on a throat cancer par, and equal to someone who's never sucked a dick, but then at #5, suddenly you shoot up 250% (again, geez, I'm sorry, no pun intended....)? Why does that fifth dick make all the difference?
These are the things I think about when I wake up at 3:30 in the morning with a sore throat.
1 comment:
It's not that four dicks is safer than five, it's what the fifth one represents, statistically.
That stat, about having 5 oral sex partners raising your risk for throat cancer is pretty recent. It comes from a Johns Hopkins Study released earlier this year. The theory (and it is merely a theory; the link between oral sex and cancer was the finding of just one study so far) is that exposure to HPV (which, statistically, at least 1 in 5 people have) may raise your risk for throat cancer.
Though it's scary when sex and cancer are in the same sentence, the numbers of people with any kind of mouth or throat cancer is real small (like, way less than 50,000 cases a year, if i remember correctly). Regardless of how much oral sex you have (and regardless of whether it's with a man or a woman, the study did not single out gay men) you're still more likely to get cancer in just about every other part of your body. So even if oral sex raises your cancer risk (and, again, that question is hardly settled), it's raising your risk from miniscule to small. My opinion is that that degree of risk is in no way worth losing out on oral sex.
If I may go on here: HPV is also the virus linked to cervical cancer, and while cancer is no joke I've always thought otherwise well-meaning magazines and health care providers did a people a disservice by scaring them about HPV. It's the most common STD on the planet, and it's only a small minority of the women who have it that will get cervical cancer. Not only that, to actually develop and die from cervical cancer you have to skip out on years of well-women health care. In short, it's poverty and lack of basic health care that causes cervical cancer to kill women, not HPV. Eventually, this oral sex & throat cancer thing may play out in a similar way.
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