it's the not knowing that kills you

I have been in bed for a few hours but sleep evades me. No drugs any more. It's back to relying on my body to send me to slumber, respite from the rubbish that the world chucks at you.

It is quiet online tonight.

I have been lying here for ages thinking about what the future holds. It's very easy to get very down when it is dark outside, when your feet are cold, when there's nobody there but yourself. I feel so panicked waiting for these results. I know the old saying goes "no news is good news" but my faith in the doctors is so low, and I am just one of those people that this sort of shit happens to. I tend to find that when shit happens to me, it happens in a big way.

Without going all "woe is me" on you, look at it like this. 1 in 12 smears (in the UK at least) will come back showing an abnormality of some degree. That's actually pretty common. If a woman joins the screening programme at, say, 25 which is the age at which we are called in for the first time now, she can expect to have at least 12 smears in her life, if not more assuming she keeps her 3-yearly appointments. Statistically, she can expect at least one abnormal result in her lifetime. Already, I have had 3 abnormal smears and I'm not even 25!! One was borderline, one showed mild changes, one showed severe abnormalities. Oh, just great.

Already, shit.

Further to this, 50% of cases of mild abnormalities will revert back to normal if left untreated, usually within 6-12months. I am in the 50% that didn't do this. Typical. And not only did these abnormalities not go back to normal, they got bloody worse too. Or maybe they didn't. Of course it could be a case that the smear showing severe abnormalities was taken from a different part of my lady donut, so it was always bad news and they got it wrong with the mild result. Not sure. Unlikely given that they have to wipe the swab around a given number of times when taking a sample (an interesting fact I learnt from a cytologist at the cancer conference I attended). Yeah, so mine got worse.

So, they take ladies like me in for more thorough investigation. Then, at colposcopy, the consultant's face went grey. I needed immediate treatment, but it had to be under GA. Brilliant. It then materialises that we are dealing with CC when I had been reassured repeatedly in the lead up to all of this that CC is extremely rare (especially at my age) and that I "shouldn't worry, it's pre-cancer and not cancer."

It's like my body or life or whatever is to blame just likes to stick two fingers up at probability. The stats are in a woman's favour... but not for me.

They say that the procedure I had has a 95% success rate. But given my history, you can forgive me for lying here wondering. Are there a handful of nasties still in there, chewing away? Will they know? Will the biopsy come back a false negative? Am I going to suffer like some of the other ladies? Will I lose great areas of my anatomy that I have always taken for granted?

Some of the women I have met have been so brave. They have endured so much - fear, pain, indignity. I am not strong enough for any of that. When I learn what they have dealt with and how they have rebuilt their lives, I just find myself shaking at the thought and wanting to go to sleep and not wake up.

It is the not knowing that kills you.

Unless, of course, it comes back that the margins aren't clear and I have to go through all this all over again. That, I imagine, would be much worse.