Get Swabbed for Cervical Health Awareness Month

This week, I want you to think about your cervix. If you don't have one of your own to think about, I want you to think about the cervix of someone close to you. Why? Because January is Cervical Health Awareness Month! It's the most common cancer found in women under 35 (in the UK), and an ounce of cervical cancer prevention is worth a pound of cure. I know, because I had a hysterectomy in 2007 to cure my cervical cancer.



Cervical Health Awareness Month has put me right back in 2007, the year I found out that I had cervical cancer. In 2007, I hadn't had a Pap smear, let alone a physical, since the Palinode and I were married in 2001, and, truth be told, I avoided them. Due to various personal issues, which I'm not going to get into here, the whole stirrups-and-speculum thing with a doctor all up in my business was triggering for me, and I preferred to skip the whole affair rather than go through stirrups/swab/cry-in-the-bathroom-on-my-way-out routine.

Let me tell you, though, if you wait long enough, relatively minor and easy-to-cure conditions can end up turning into cervical cancer, and that once yearly swab can turn into impressive numbers of medical professionals being all up in your business. Hell, I spent a couple of afternoons with my cervix being broadcast on a big screen TV in a surgical theatre to an audience of several people. "This must be what shooting porn gets to be like after a while," I thought, "only without all the fun parts."

Compared to that, the Pap smear is NOTHING. It's well worth the minor amount of fuss to find pre-cancerous conditions with relatively minor treatments, because leaving it go too long can have you end up on the wrong end of the cancer spectrum, which is why I'm now out both a cervix and one uterus due to cervical cancer.

Oh, and lest you think that there's a bright side to hysterectomies, like not getting your period anymore, let me enlighten you. You know how people who have a body part amputated sometimes experience Phantom Limb Syndrome? Well, my uterus is my phantom limb. I still get menstrual cramps about every other month from a uterus that doesn't even exist anymore, which is, yes, the stupidest thing any of us have ever heard. Also, it's a bit of a kick to the psyche.

So, I want everyone and the people they love who are in the possession of a cervix to hop up into their doctor's stirrups and get that thing swabbed on the regular, because one of the best and proven steps that someone can take to prevent a cancer is to have a Pap test. I had no symptoms of cervical cancer prior to diagnosis, so it's worth the appointment, even if you feel healthy. Some doctors suggest doing it every year, and some every few years depending on your age and medical history, but I say why not make it an annual party, like a birthday present to yourself to ensure you keep having more birthdays?

Cervical Cancer Information

• Pap test fact sheet, WomensHealth.gov
• Keeping Your Cervix Healthy, Canadian Women's Health Network
• Cervical Cancer, Mayo Clinic
• HPV and Cancer, a National Cancer Institute Factsheet

So, make an appointment and go get swabbed! It saved my life, and it could save yours. You're worth it.

Five Is the Magic Number: I'm Technically Cancer Free!

July 3rd, which was two days ago, marked five years since I was made relatively cancer-free by a Total Laparoscopic Hysterectomy, which is a procedure that removes the cervix and uterus while leaving the ovaries to do whatever it is that ovaries do when they are freed from their original compatriots.

Five years is the magic number. Had I not had severe fears about all doctors for the first three years after sugery, I would have gone to the doctor for a pap smear every six months and a yearly CT scan. I finally snapped into understanding the real possibility of death and have been fairly faithful with my appointments over the last two years. Each pap smear and CT scan showed nothing out of the ordinary.

That's disappointing every time, because I always kind of held out hope that they would find weird things inside me like bottle caps and keys and whatnot like that woman I read about as a kid in the Guinness Book of World Records who compulsively ate objects in her sleep. When they cut her open, they found all kinds of household items including hundreds of safety pins.

As I said, though, five is the magic number. At five years, I get to stop my bi-annual pap smears and CT scans. Technically, I am considered to be pretty much in the clear, and I can go on with my life without feeling like every doctor's appointment might be about how I'm going to die.

That "technically" is only the technical part, though. My heart doesn't understand that I'm free. Part of me imagines that a seed of the cancer remains and lies in wait, ready to spring into rapid growth with the right provocation.

I just stopped to remark to the Palinode that this post is turning out to be really depressing. When I started, I was going to be light-hearted and bright about it, because come on, I don't have cancer anymore.

I DON'T HAVE CANCER ANYMORE!

It turns out that once I was told I had cancer and let that fact sink in, I was never able to go back to feeling what it was like to not know I had cancer. The time before feels like an innocence I don't get to have anymore.

I've been weighted down with this for the last more than five years, but it just occurred to me during this exact moment right now as I'm writing this that this loss of innocence, like so many other hard things, is less of an obstacle and more of an invitation.

(If you've come this far through this entry, thank you, because it's these revelations part way through that really get us where we're going.)

I've always felt that I was robbed of a certain kind of innocence when I was told I had cancer, but, suddenly, I can see the invitation in it. I am being invited into a deeper understanding of my place here as a mortal being. I am being invited to value time in a new way.

I have always seen time as this cruel boundary that defines our eventual deaths — I've been gifted with such a sunny disposition, don't you know — but I just realized that it is also time which defines the boundaries around who we are and how we exist and what our relationships are to one another and the rest of the universe. Time makes whatever gifts we have here possible.

Time's defining boundary around our lives makes everything we love possible.

I think I've become just a little more hopeful.

I am five years and two days cancer-free today. I really am five years cancer-free today, and it turns out that this innocence we're all told to value so much isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Here's to letting life rob me of innocence for many more years to come!

Time Is Pretty Cool When It Isn't Forcing You to Exist Continuously Through Another Terrible January

This is my middle-of-the-night stream-of-consciousness post that I am not going to allow myself to delete later. It's a good exercise. It loosens up the blogging fingers and let's me freak out a little about something not related to my imminent death.


This is me in the tub with my kitty, Oskar, who is ridiculous and likes to be
extremely close to, but not actually in, hot water.

My death is not actually imminent, but it's January right now, and January is when I am pretty sure that my death is imminent anyway. I am sure that I will get cancer again and that my mid-winter weight gain is a symptom of a thyroid condition related to that imaginary cancer, and then I watch a documentary about breast cancer and pink-washing, and I end up walking around the apartment feeling myself up repeatedly and wondering if that spot I keep poking is going to be the cause of my imminent demise or if I should just cut back on my caffeine intake.

I like the way caffeine is spelled. I always say it caff-ay-inn-ay as I type it out.

That's when the visual migraine thing I sometimes get kicks in, and the whole world starts to sparkle in blinding patches like it's all turning into a disco ball, and I worry that it's actually a sign of a brain tumour or probably a stroke, because the visual migraine is usually accompanied by some facial numbness, and I realize that I haven't showered in a day-and-a-half, and, if I am going to end up in an emergency room with a stroke, I want to look and smell better while I do it, so I get into the shower and don't realize until half way through that I am possibly the dumbest person having a stroke ever, so I get out of the shower and drip all over the floor so that I can inspect my face for asymmetrical drooping, and, being that there isn't any, I decide that I'm not having a stroke and finish my shower, after which I take some Benadryl and have a long, therapeutic nap.


This is what crap I looked like before that shower.

The good news is that I'm not dying! The bad news is that I could be, but so could we all. Oh, January. I cannot quit you, at least as long as time keeps functioning the way it does.

Yesterday afternoon, during one of my therapeutic naps, I had this terribly involved dream about smoking pot, those outdoor hamburger figurines from 1970s McDonalds, baby tigers, and the nature of time. It was fantastic. In my dream, time only seemed to function in a linear fashion for those who didn't understand it, but, once you began to understand the true nature of time, it would function more in accordance with its true nature in loops and pockets and waves, and it all resulted in me getting really stoned by accident after having been mislead by a plastic, anthropomorphic garden hamburger in Alabama, and I ended up cuddling baby tigers soaked in orange juice with my aunt, who, not understanding the true nature of time, disapproved of the fact that they were being kept in giant hamster exercise balls. Poor baby tigers. They were sticky.

Time is pretty cool when it isn't forcing you to exist continuously through another terrible January filled with death anxiety.

Somehow, this is all making me think of Edenland. Hello, Edenland! I hope you are having a fine evening, or morning, or whatever time of day you are having over there in Australia.

The End.