I was late bloomer in starting my pap smears. I moved around a lot and my father is a family physician so I never got around to getting a legit family physician. So I finally did two years ago and fortunately he’s very thorough and recommended I get a routine pap smear. Surprise, surprise, it came back slightly abnormal (ASCUS to be specific). He recommended that I repeat it again in 6 months and I did. All this time he reassured me that it will clear on it’s own and recommended I get the HPV vaccine (Guardisil 9 just came out). It came back again ASCUS so he referred me to a gynecologist to get to the bottom of why it kept coming back slightly abnormal. The gynecologist took a look and saw a polyp (nothing alarming) and sent away for HPV testing. It came back positive (which strain I do not know) and again ASCUS. Once again he reassured me that the HPV vaccine will take sometime to work. On Dec 1st (actually Nov 30- i mixed up my dates and i’m very fortunate I did) and found myself at the colposcopy clinic. Fortunately they were able to squeeze me in for a colposcopy. As it turns out, the pap smears had missed the supposed gradual transition to High-grade dysplasia/precancerous lesion which the colposcopy caught. I was booked relatively quickly (according to canadian standards) for LEEP (or LEETZ) and had it done under local this past Monday. Fortunately, it well pretty smoothly without much pain but the hardest thing now is that I have to wait for the results to come back… the sad and sick irony is that i’m a oncology druggist/pharmacist and I see patients affected with cancer every single day. I hoping I dont turn up on the other side…
Hope your results come back soon x
