Don’t Be Afraid of Cervical Screening

It’s a mammoth achievement in medicine and it takes two minutes

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I get it. You don’t want to lie on a clinic bed, naked from the waist down whilst a medical profession sticks something that could rightly be called an ‘implement’ up your vagina.

I mean, nobody wants that.

But nobody wants to do their taxes, clean up kid vomit at 4am or floss their teeth either. Life comes with some inconvenient essentials.

I want to tell you how cervical screening (probably) saved my life and why two minutes of discomfort every 3 to 5 years is not all that bad.

Me, Aged Fifteen

I was flicking through a copy of Glamour fifteen years ago when I came across an advert in the back. Yup, I even read through the adverts in those days.

The advert was a call for women aged 15 to 25 to take part in a huge cervical cancer vaccine trial in London.

For some reason I thought it sounded like a good idea. What can I say? I was a precocious and spontaneous teenager.

I called up the number and signed on. It was a trial involving over 18,000 women and run by GlaxoSmithKline for the now approved Cervarix vaccine.