![]() I joined a growing number of queer men who were creating grassroots resources to help keep each other safe. I was incredibly fortunate and privileged to have gotten the timely care that I did, and it still took me a week to get a positive test result. Many patients struggled to get diagnosed and find adequate care, facing severe lags in testing and encountering providers who weren’t educated on the new outbreak. The challenges of dealing with MPX, especially in the early days, were brutal. After all, the internet is gonna internet. I was grateful that the majority of responses to my story were caring and kind, but there were still some trolls who had cruel things to say. In the span of a few weeks, I’d become one of the leading public faces of the MPX outbreak. ![]() I also wrote for, or was reported on, in the New York Times, the LA Times, PEOPLE, SELF, BuzzFeed, and more. I appeared on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and many more stations. Soon, I was getting interview and first-person essay requests from major media outlets, both nationally and locally in New York and Los Angeles. That post also went viral, initially gaining a few hundred thousand views and later surging to over 1.5 million. So 3 days later, I posted a TikTok discussing the outbreak and my own experience with it. I could see in the replies that people were beginning to take MPX’s presence in the U.S. Reporters began reaching out, and I was receiving well wishes from the likes of Patricia Arquette. I watched friends tweeting about trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to get the vaccine, and I figured that speaking up about my experience would be helpful. It was the day that the Jynneos MPX vaccine dropped without notice in New York and Los Angeles. But on June 23, I decided to tweet about it. I was originally on the fence about whether to publicly acknowledge my early case of MPX, fearing embarrassment and struggling with my own sense of shame. mine was unique in how public it quickly became. From virus to viralĪmong the tens of thousands of confirmed MPX cases worldwide - and the more than 20,000 cases in the U.S. ![]() It was incredibly frustrating near the end when a new pox would appear since I knew that it would only delay my recovery that much longer.īut I finally reached that point and was cleared on July 12, a full 3 weeks and 3 days after I first noticed symptoms. A MPX patient isn’t considered fully recovered until every sore’s scab has fallen off and revealed fresh, smooth skin underneath. ![]()
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January 2023
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