strike that

medical shit part two

The strange thing so far about the bad Pap test is I don’t know how to feel. Sometimes it seems like it’s just an inconvenience that half the women out there have been through, and I’m silly for worrying about it. Sometimes it seems scarier.

Last week I got a number of phone calls from friends who read my blog, and almost all of them were about how some other friend or relative had been through this. The message seemed to be that the waiting sucks and the expense sucks and all the sitting-in-stirrups sucks, but at the end of the day it all gets taken care of and that’s that. But then came the one conversation with a friend who told me she had a slightly abnormal Pap recently, but was really worried about it because a few years earlier her friend, an athlete in her twenties, died of cervical cancer. So.

I put it aside all weekend. Mostly all weekend I just enjoyed the dry pine smell of high desert brush, and the freezing cold meltwater, and the big big moon. Mostly all weekend I felt deeply peaceful and… healthy.

Not so much, said the envelope waiting for me back home from Planned Parenthood. Inside were the test results, no different from what I was told on the phone. Except that the front page in the envelope is a check list eight items long, and the top item is “Negative for Intraepithelial Lesion (Normal)” and the bottom one is “Cancerous Cells,” and in between are the eight increasing degrees of Not Normal, and mine is number seven. Next to it, it explains: “This is a moderate to severe condition that may progress to cancer if left untreated. It is important to have this evaluated by colposcopy and biopsy.”

The Understanding Your Diagnosis and Management Options brochure that was also in the envelope – a brochure filled with multiethnic people looking at each other knowingly, and numerous pink illustrations of female reproductive organs – defines HSIL this way: “Cells show precancerous changes. Or, noninvasive cancer may be present.”

Overall, the best I can put together from the web and the conversations with friends is this: Paps can be abnormal to varying degrees. They can be a little abnormal, which is really common. They can be a lot abnormal, which is less common, which is what mine is. The more abnormal they are, the more likely that the follow up evaluation finds pre-cancerous cells that need to be removed. Sometimes, but not often, the follow up finds cancer.

So here I am back with what I knew before, which is that I have to hang out for two more weeks and then we’ll see, and we’ll do what needs doing. In the mean time I’m just going to try not to dwell on it. On the plus side, the following email (reproduced in its entirety) arrived in my inbox yesterday: After reading your blog, it appears as though your cervix and mine should go have a drink sometime. So at least my cervix will be maintaining an active social life.

posted by tortaluga @ 10:29 PM