Party's Over, Time to Get Tested
Unless you’re lucky enough to have a freshers’ fortnight, freshers’ week will almost be over. You’ve been eased in to uni life with a couple of sign up classes and a load of nights you’ll never want to forget. Now it’s time to buckle down and start studying.
It’s alright to have all these safety messages floating around on Twitter and Facebook - we should know, we posted a lot of them - but what about if you did end up having one too many?
You might think unprotected sex isn’t even that risky compared to what other people got up to in freshers’. Stories of ending up in A&E at 1am and losing everything but the taxi fare back to halls can make risky bedroom antics seem completely harmless. However further down the line you might regret having a laugh about that one time instead of taking it seriously and going to the clinic.
Some of the most common STIs among young people, such as chlamydia, don’t have any symptoms. Unless you or your partner have recently been tested, you can’t be 100% sure that neither of you has an STI. It’s advisable to get tested every time you change partner so you can be safe in the knowledge that you haven’t got the STI or be treated if you have caught it.
If you think you’ve put yourself at risk of catching chlamydia during freshers’, don’t put off getting tested. It’s recommended to wait two weeks after potential exposure, but you can order a free home test kit today to complete later. If you think you’ll forget and leave it to gather dust under a pile of freshers’ freebies, we’ll even send you a reminder by text.
The test is discreet so you’re flatmates won’t know what you’ve ordered and comes with a full set of instructions for you to complete it on your own. Once you’ve sent it off, you can track your test to see where it’s at up until your results are ready. If your test does come back positive for chlamydia, you’ll be put in touch with the right people in your area to help.