on the d.l.
I got a cheerful message on my voicemail last week. Have a good weekend! And oh, what’s up with your cervix? It was followed, less than a week later, by an email from a different friend asking What’s happening with your cervix these days?My cervix has never gotten so much of this sort of attention before. It might be blushing. I realize it was weird of me to introduce my cervix here on my blog a couple months ago and then not mention it again. It’s kind of what happened in my head.
A couple weeks after the annoying procedure (which has a name so clinical and awful sounding that I don’t even want to write it) the nurse practitioner phoned up to tell me that the results confirmed the earlier test: highly irregular cells hanging out on my cervix. She told me to go get another procedure called a LEEP. This name sounds better but actually stands for Loop Electrosurgical Excision Procedure, which really isn’t all that enticing either. She said to do it in one to two months.
I was, at this point, within sight of having health insurance. So I waited. I’d like to say that was the only reason I waited, but it wouldn’t be entirely true. Brains react in strange ways to medical news and I just didn’t want to deal with this. I wanted to ignore it and then I wanted it to go away. I realize that is not rational and that it is, in fact, rather self-destructive. Which isn’t how I meant it. But there it is.
Several of my friends pestered me about it during this time, for which I am very appreciative. It clearly worked its way into my reluctant brain because one night I couldn’t fall asleep and I realized I was thinking about it, how I hadn’t taken care of it and it had been a while since the news. I started to get a little panicky. I got up and checked my calendar. It had been six weeks. Not downright negligent, but fairly stupid. Scheduling the appointment would take time. It was hard not to think about the possibility that one particularly ambitious little fucked up cell might float off to settle somewhere else in my body. I was a bio major but there is no logic when it comes to one’s own health.
My insurance kicked in October first. The benefits orientation was the eighteenth, and I waited for this because health insurance is confusing and there were several options. The paperwork took four more days. Yesterday I got an email confirmation, and I took an early lunch break, and I called my new HMO. They were nice. They were friendly. I was worried that I might have to see some in-system doctor to reconfirm my earlier diagnosis – part of my procrastination had been fear that this would happen. Instead I explained the history to a nurse, who told me not to worry because these things happen slowly. And then she told me that one of the doctors had a cancelled surgery on Friday and I could take the time slot.
So there it is. Just like that I’m going to get it done tomorrow. The whole thing takes hardly any time at all – just a scary electric loop slicing off errant cells in a place that’s a little tricky to reach, and then I feel crappy for a few days and check up on things often. And hopefully that’s the last time my cervix makes the blog.
posted by tortaluga @ 12:50 PM
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