The Dirty Dreaded HPV

HPV—more than half your friends have it, but for some reason you’ve never heard of it. According to my doctor, the human papillomavirus affects something on the order of seventy percent of sexually active adults. According to the American Social Health Association, it’s more like eighty percent. That’s a lot of people, and yet, up until the last year, you rarely heard anything about it. In fact, I even remember my mom about five years ago having an irregular pap, being told it was “pre-cancer,” which freaked all of us out, and having to go in for this “procedure” that was described as no big deal turned out being what she described as one of the worst things she’d ever been through. This is a woman who gave birth to twins, each nearly eight pounds, without knowing she was even carrying two babies.

Even now, the facts are a little fuzzy. Trust me, I just went through the whole process, and it went roughly like this: phone call from doctor telling me that my pap was irregular, but it was nothing to worry about it, just something worth following up on; she referred me to an ob-gyn to do a more extensive test, called a colposcopy; I call a couple of friends, and one tells me, “Oh, that’s HPV—I had that too and had to do just the initial procedure, and it was awful. I was shaking so badly after, I could barely walk, and I couldn’t drive for two hours. BUT, at least it’s not the one that causes genital warts.”

Totally. But how sad is it that we were glad we had the more aggressive, cancer-causing strain than the milder, wart-causing variety?

Another friend tells me she had to do it too, and it was no big deal—that the friend who told me it was bad was probably one of those girls who thinks papsmears are the worst thing ever. A little on edge, I go to the ob-gyn. She tells me it is HPV but not to worry because it’s very common (that’s when I got the seventy percent statistic). She tells me what the “colp” will entail—you’ll have a speculum in, just like a regular papsmear, and then I’ll have to put a vinegar mixture on your cervix. This allows me to see if there are any irregular cells. If there are, I will take a biopsy of those. We’ll send it in, and then I’ll know in seven to ten days if we need to perform another procedure.