"There is no chronic (long- term) infection with hepatitis A. People do not become carriers of the hepatitis A virus."

"Avoid having sex while you're infectious – hepatitis A is most infectious from around two weeks before the symptoms start until about a week after they first develop."

ok. so...if i got hep A in the blackout, the person i got it from would have had to have been exposed recently. and, further, it would have had to have been in an anal-oral transmission. even in the worst blackout scenario, i would have no doubt gagged. 

i wish he would have told me that or printed the results out, because the transmission possibilities around hep A really rules out the possibility of a consensual encounter. i was either raped or i was vaccinated. which is more likely?

on the one hand, i think it's pretty low probability to suggest i happen to have been raped by somebody who was in an active transmission stage of hepatitis A in detroit in 2016. this is a third world disease that has a short window for transmission. and, i guess that detroit is in bad shape. but, poverty does not introduce disease, right? the disease has to come from somewhere. this is so unlikely as to rule it out.

unfortunately, however, the low probability of the scenario doesn't rule out all of the other evidence leaning towards a sexual encounter and a disease transmission: waking up with a sore anus and bruises, and then getting sick not once but twice over a long period of lethargy that included a bout of possible jaundice.

of course, it's not impossible that i could have had sex that night and already been vaccinated.

there's nothing i can do except wait. but, i think that the possibility that i got hep A is really so remote that the presence of antibodies is re-opening the potentiality of a vaccination in my mind; i had all but ruled that out once i got sick. and, if i got a hep A vaccination, i would have almost certainly gotten it with a hep B vaccination.

i can't handle being unable to deduce this. that's what upsets me. but, it's just more demonstration of the superiority of empirical epistemology. like i needed one....