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!

The Five Best Decisions Of My Life

@Chookooloonks tweeted this question: "5 best decisions of my adult life so far: go to law school, move to London, marry @marzjennings, adopt Alex, quit law. What are your 5 best?"



I was surprised at how quickly and easily I came up with my five: "My 5 best decisions: not choosing suicide, marrying @palinode, getting a pap smear in 2006, blogging, sobriety."


Not choosing suicide.

I experienced my first serious bout with suicidal thoughts when I was about eight years old, and those thoughts have dogged me most of my life. I have managed to remain relatively free of suicidal thinking over the last three years, which is no small feat.

This sounds so sad, and it is to an extent, but it's also a gift. I am aware every day that I have chosen to be alive, that I have chosen to be here and do the hard work of being alive, and that I have chosen it because life is short and the return for choosing to be here and working to do so with an open heart is large.

Marrying the Palinode.

I was terrified to be in love in 2000, but I never felt more at home with myself and with my life than when I was with the Palinode. It was the greatest leap of faith I have ever taken, and it is one I continue to take more than ten years later.

It is because of him that I have had the love and support I've needed to grow into a life I once didn't believe I could create.

Getting a pap smear in 2006.

In 2006, I hadn't had a pap smear in six years, and I listened to a niggling little thought in the back of my head that urged me to go. It turned out that I had cervical cancer, and I ended up having a hysterectomy in 2007. Catching cancer early, undoubtedly, makes all of what my life has been since then possible.

Sometimes, those voices in your head are real. Listen to them.

Blogging.

Next to the Palinode, blogging has had the most sweeping effects on my adult life. I am not being hyperbolic here.

Before I found blogging in 2003, I was a creative person who created nothing. I was insecure and depressed and had no hopes that I could ever realize my creative dreams. Blogging has opened up worlds of connection and creativity that I could never have forecast, and the things I've done and the decisions I've made since August of 2003 have largely happened because of this space right here. I learned to listen to myself, write, take photographs, design both on and off the web, quit work that hurt me and embrace work that built me up, and embrace vulnerability so that I could love more fully and take on sobriety.

Never forget, even in the face of some injustices we face here, that we have built amazing things within this dear old internet.

Sobriety.

I quit drinking in August of 2010, just a year and a month ago, and I credit that decision with saving my life. I can't even wrap my mind around all that it has affected yet.

I feel as though love is being revealed to me, as though layers are slowly being peeled away to show me the nature of the universe. I sound like a crazy person, but that's what's happening. Without the alcohol to, quite literally, dampen my spirits, I am waking up, I am opening up, and it is terrifying and beautiful. I have new eyes. I am learning to be present in my own life.

What are the five best decisions you've made?