I just happened to read this and thought I would invite everyone else to take a look then come on back over here and let me tell you a little story.

Go on, I'll wait!

About 4 years ago, I had my very first abnormal pap. I was a little freaked out by it, but I knew people that had them come back this way and it was nothing so I wasn't too bothered. At the time, I had no health insurance so I wasn't really sure just what my options would be anyway. I went to my regular doctor for the pap instead of an OB-GYN for that reason. I knew that he would let me pay when I could.

Anyway, he wanted me to go to an OB-GYN that he knew and have a colposcopy done, which is just looking at your cervix with a very high-powered microscope to check out the abnormal areas. Just so you know, the pap was just a little abnormal, but my doc likes to err on the side of caution. The procedure was going to cost too much so I decided to just go back for another pap in 6 months.

Six months later, it came back as normal. Yay! No worries, we can go back to annual visits. Fast forward to just a little over a year later in early 2005. I still do not have health insurance at this point, but I went back to my regular doc for my annual exam. Abnormal again. A little more abnormal than last time. Still without the health insurance I waited 3 months or so and had another pap. The first one came back with mild dysplasia (I don't feel like htmling, so look it up). 3 months later, I've got sever dysplasia. One small step away from cervical cancer. I'm 25 years old at this point. Fuck the fact that I don't have health insurance, my parents helped me and I went and had the colposcopy done. At the same time, they did a biopsy of several parts of my cervix and let me just tell you, it was a painful procedure.

Several days later the doctor calls and tells me they need to do laser surgery and remove the abnormal parts of my cervix. I'm totally scared at this point, but we schedule the surgery. In April 2005 I go in for the surgery. When I wake up, they tell me that instead of using a laser, they had to do what called a cold-knife cone (once again, look it up) and had to remove a larger part of my cervix than expected but they believe they got it all.

Of course the next month I got pregnant and never dialated at all during about 15 hours of hard labor and I have of course had pap smears every 4 months or so since and only had one come back as abnormal.

I guess what I'm getting at is if I had had the opportunity for a vaccine that could have prevented everything I had to go through and will go through for the rest of my life, I would have done it in a heartbeat. Anyone that has the opportunity to get this vaccine, please do it. I have never been so scared in my life. All I could think was cancer at 25. What will happen to my daughter? Luckily, I'm ok, but the next person may not be.