This is the second post about a chapter of my life that I’m on the other side of. If you missed the previous post, start here.
The wind shook against my bedroom windows.
The wind chimes jangled frantically as if they were carrying a message … one they desperately needed me to hear.
This wasn’t something a gentle whisper of the wind could communicate. It felt like something bigger was coming.
I tossed from side to side in bed, trying to drown out the catastrophic thoughts swirling around in my head.
“This sucks. How did this happen? What if it’s bad? Will I be able to get through this?”
I was wide awake in anticipation, just as I imagined other people in the country were, glued to their phones on election night.
But I was more preoccupied with what was on my schedule the following day:
An appointment I’d been anxiously awaiting for two weeks.
A procedure that would determine if I had cervical cancer.
The two-week wait
For two weeks leading up to this moment, the same question looped in my head: how did I get HPV?
An unanswerable question, but one that I continued to pursue. With enough overanalysis and pressure, perhaps something would finally crack and reveal a hidden message buried deep within my subconscious.
Two weeks of forcing a positive mindset, a mindset of invincible strength that would give me the resilience to handle the worst news …
Only for a wave of nausea to hit when the C word re-entered my brain, along with the overwhelming urge to put my head in a toilet and hurl.
The morning after the howling winds, I woke up groggy and disoriented, my brain not fully conscious enough to process that the two-week wait was over.
Though my brain was half-asleep, my body sensed a heaviness in the air. Something was off.
When I checked my phone, I learned that the country would not have its first female president.
It was too much to think about things crumbling down in my own little world AND the rest of the country, too.
I’d let myself worry about that when the procedure was over.
The colposcopy
I drove to the colposcopy appointment with the mentality that I just needed to get this over with. I wanted to be on the other side of this procedure; to not have to think about this anymore.
That was my usual way of thinking: Get the thing over with, and then I can breathe.
Meanwhile, I felt deeply unsettled that such a procedure, the act of plucking out a sample of tissue from an internal organ, would be administered with nothing more than three ibuprofen.
Before the appointment began, the nurse took my blood pressure twice after some alarming results. I could hide my nerves from the outside world, but my body revealed the truth.
In the exam room, I sat in the large padded chair with a blue sheet of paper draped across my lap, my backside completely exposed.
I held onto my sweaty fingertips inside the large pocket of my sweatshirt, as if I were a kid who needed her mom to hold her hand. I kicked my feet around, trying to dispel the nervous energy in my body.
The doctor entered the room with her piercing blue eyes, chic grey bob, and braces. I noticed the beaded bracelet around her wrist with the message ‘We are not going back’. She asked if I had any questions before we got started.
The exam
I wondered if I should even bring up the pelvic pain I’d been experiencing for the past two weeks, pain that radiated from my inner-leg crease around my pelvis.
My eyes shifted around as I observed the doctor’s face to determine if she was really in the room with me. Did she see me, or was I just another patient?
Her braces reminded me that she was a human being, just like me.
She seemed warm … so why was I worried about bothering her?
Maybe because if she was willing to listen to me, she might find something horribly wrong. There’s a chance I could leave this exam room with two diagnoses.
My heart started racing. “Could you take a look?” I asked.
The next thing I knew, she was performing what felt like an excavation of my inside regions. My breath caught as she pressed with her entire body weight on my pelvis.
Through gritted teeth, I mentioned an ultrasound from years ago that noted a luteum cyst. She dismissed that idea, saying I wouldn’t be able to feel that. My cheeks flushed with embarrassment, and I wished I hadn’t brought it up.
After more poking and prodding, she nonchalantly threw out the idea that it could be my lymph nodes. I felt the blood pulsing in my body as I tucked her comment away for a later Google session, too afraid to ask what it meant in the moment.
The biopsy
Before I had time to panic over something being wrong with my lymph nodes, the doctor inserted the speculum, the instrument dragging instead of sliding with the friction of something going where it doesn’t want to go.
She reminded me to relax.
I felt gridlocked, as if there was absolutely no way to escape. I was pinned down with this object inside of me, forced to hold completely still.
She rolled her microscope-on-wheels, which looked straight out of a middle school science fair, closer to the chair. As she swabbed a vinegar solution on my cervix, I almost laughed at her goggle-like glasses until I remembered where I was.
“I’m noticing a small area of white on your cervix,” she said.
A black veil clouded my vision, followed by white spots. The room seemed to be tilting around me. I hoped I might pass out so I wouldn’t have to feel what was next.
When she pulled out a pair of long prongs, my eyes widened cartoonishly large. Those couldn’t possibly be going inside of me.
She told me to take a deep breath.
As I forced the breath out of my lungs, I felt an abrupt pinch.
My body flinched, like when your leg involuntarily moves after the doctor hits your knee with a rubber hammer. It was as if my body took a screenshot of that moment.
“You’re bleeding a lot”, she said nonchalantly.
I felt my body recoil, wishing she’d kept that detail to herself.
“When do the cramps start?” I asked.
With a tilt of her head, she said: “If you’re not cramping yet, you probably won’t experience that.”
A metallic smell engulfed the room as she applied silver nitrate to stop the bleeding.
The doctor reminded me to keep breathing as she used a lot of pressure to scrape away at my cervix with what felt like a dull wooden stick.
I wondered what types of unsettling things my doctor had seen in her life. Was this a normal Wednesday procedure for her?
As the scraping intensified, I held onto the sides of the chair tightly, my sweaty palms barely able to get a grip.
I felt like a child in that moment, and all I wanted was for someone to hold my hand and tell me I was going to be okay. I wanted to sob and release all of the fear in my body, but that wasn’t possible with this stranger staring down my cervix with her microscope glasses.
So instead, I told myself I would be okay.
With a smile, the doctor said I had good, healthy mucus. That felt like a win, even if it made me cringe.
When she finally took the speculum out, my knees smashed into each other as my legs quivered uncontrollably. She told me to get up slowly as she tossed a heat pack at my stomach.
With one foot out the door, she said I’d probably be okay. A moment later, she disappeared out of the room as if she had better things to attend to.
Hearing the word ‘probably’ gave me a glimmer of hope until I realized it wasn’t a guarantee. I’d still have to live in uncertainty again until I received the results.
The aftermath
The day after the procedure, it felt like a dry tampon was stuck inside of me when I sat down. Sometimes it felt like my cervix was pulsating, which made me acutely aware of the fact that my body was always doing things that I have no business feeling.
I moved with caution, not wanting to disturb anything inside of me. What if I started bleeding spontaneously from one wrong step? What if I ended up in the hospital?
When I went to the bathroom, I found black specks that looked like coffee grounds all over the toilet paper. Google told me it was from the silver nitrate used to stop the bleeding. Somehow I’d accidentally purchased lavender-scented toilet paper, and the smell was nauseating every time I used it.
For days, dark slimy goop came out of me.
When I ran up the stairs with too much gusto and felt a huge clump of goopy matter come out of me before I reached the top, I was reminded that my body was still recovering.
The results
After a few days of cautious movement, I found myself rehearsing how I’d respond to good or bad news. I picked up my phone every five minutes, eagerly awaiting a message from my doctor.
While working from a coffee shop, my healthcare app notified me of new test results.
The chatter around me went quiet.
My sweaty fingers left marks on my phone screen as I scrambled to check the results.
Benign.
No evidence of cancerous or precancerous cells. Just some acute and chronic inflammation (you bet I Googled that right after).
This was good news. My doctor’s note specifically said, ‘Great news!’
But my body still felt as tense as when I was lying on the exam chair.
Could the doctor have missed something? Why did I have inflammation? Why did I still have pain on the right side of my pelvis? How the hell did I get HPV?
My mind short-circuited. I couldn’t relax because I was caught in a loop that started after the initial HPV diagnosis.
I needed this pelvic pain to go away before I could let myself relax. I was going to figure out what was wrong with me.
I had to fix it. I always fix things.
Disclaimer: This post documents my personal journey with HPV and health anxiety and should not be taken as medical advice.