Another bit of good news

I got the results from my last smear screen (the high spot of Christmas Eve!) today - thankfully all is normal. I was a bit perturbed when the nurse said that I would now be going from 3-yearly to 5-yearly tests - bearing in mind the year that I have had - but it seems that statistically I am a very low risk now. (For anyone who doesn't know, the smear test (or Pap test) is to detect changes which might be a sign of Cervical cancer - this is done by taking a scrape of the tissue from the cervix, ie the neck of the womb, smearing it on a slide and looking at it under a microscope. Taking the sample is an undignified procedure which can be painful, and you can look the details up on the Interweb-thingy if you really want to know!)
It seems that Cervical cancer is now almost inextricably linked to the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) - this is a family of viruses that usually cause no problems at all, tend to be shared during sexual contact, can lead to genital warts but can, sometimes, lead to cancer in the cervix, anus or penis... the link between HPV and cervical cancer is now so strong that teenage girls are being offered immunisation against the virus - hopefully this means that in a generation this particular cancer will disappear. Here's hoping.
It seems that cervical cancer is pretty much unheard of in nuns, which started someone thinking that there may be a link with sexual activity, hence the research in this area. There seemed to be a link with HPV - and this virus is typically most common in people who have had many (how many is many? more than one?) sexual partners. And thus ladies of a "certain age", who are settled in a long-term relationship and have not had many changes of sexual partners recently, seem to be a very low risk. As the nurse put it "any HPV you are going to encounter right now is something you have been exposed to for a number of years, and if it was going to cause a problem it would have showed up by now". So screening every five years is perfectly adequate, rather than the three years it's been most of my life.

So, a clean bill of health in that department, and one thing less to worry about. Hurrah!
However - if you're a teenage girl, or the parent of one, think seriously about the HPV vaccine. Do your bit to help wipe this cancer out.
And if you're sexually active, make sure you do get a smear test every three years. It might be undignified, but it's a whole lot better than getting cancer. Believe me.