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B The Michian Daily - Wednesdav, March 21 2007
Coming to terms with HPV
felt sick.
When I heard the news, I felt the blood
rush out of my head as if my heart had
stopped. Now I knew why they ask people to
sit down before they tell them bad news.
I sat down.
It was strange, I thought, that the nurse
prefaced our phone conversation by congrat-
ulating me on testing negative for gonorrhea
and Chlamydia. To me, it seemed like con-
gratulating someone for not being in prison.
Then she dropped the bomb. She told me I
had HPV. Actually, what she told me was that
a laboratory found signs of a cellular abnor-
mality that was associated with pre-cancer-
ous lesions caused by the human papilloma
virus.
Suddenly, all my years of education could
not help me comprehend what that nurse had
just told me.
She explained the two types of HPV. High-
risk goes with cancer; low risk goes with
genital warts. It was the only time in my life
that I found myself actually hoping I would
get cancer.
I hung up the phone feeling confused.
The nurse had told me to use protection, but
what was she talking about? I had an STD. I
couldn't ever have sex again.
Then I thought about him, and that's when
the tears started streaming down my face.
He was the most perfect man I had ever met.
Now, everything was ruined.
I was an emotional mess. But after the ini-
tial shock, the only thing I felt was unadul-
terated rage.
Like the acronym says, this disease was
transmitted, and for me there was only one
possible place it could have come from. If the
culprit had been anywhere within my sight,
I'm pretty sure I would have attempted to
kill him. Of all the things in my life he had
ruined, this took the cake.
Still, things didn't make sense because I
was tested after him.
I set aside my murderous visions and tried
to learn more about what was going on.
The nurse had said something about a cel-
lular abnormality, but that term was vague,
and the severity of the situation wasn't clear.
Knowing more is typically comforting,
but try typing "HPV" into a Google image
search. You'll come up with some of the most
disturbing stuff on the Internet.
I stormed over to UHS demanding
answers. Eventually, I got one.
When I went into the clinic nine months
earlier and asked for a full STD screening,
they didn't screen me for HPV. Even though
HPV is the most prevalent STD in America
today, they didn't test me for that because of
my age.
Later that night, I called a friend who I
knew wouldn't judge me and told her doctors
had found abnormalities on a pap smear.
She wasn't shocked. She wasn't even sur-
prised. She nonchalantly told me that she
had been told the same thing a while back.
Soon after that, I began to realize the
scope of the situation. Getting this diagnosis
was like joining a secret society. I found out
that most of my best friends were members,
and I had never known. The woman at the
check-in counter at UHS was a member too,
even my OBGYN.
I started to come to terms with HPV. I
thought of it more like mono and less like
AIDS, and learned that symptoms rarely
manifest. Usually a person's immune system
will clear the virus without any treatments,
which is one reason why doctors don't often
screen women under 21.
That's what most of my friends said hap-
pened to them, except for one who developed
cervical cancer from a really mean strain.
She had to get biopsies and surgery, but she's
okay now.
My friends still had sex, too. They told me
how supportive their partners were when
they found out, and that mine would be, too.
He was.
A while later, I was sitting in a different
doctor's office for a completely unrelated
matter. I wanted to get another professional
opinion onHPV, though, so I hesitantlybegan
to tell the doctor that there was another issue
I wanted to discuss with him.
"Oh, yeah," he said. "If you're talking
about your abnormal pap, I just looked at the
HPV test and saw it was negative. Congratu-
lations."
I asked him to double-check. Then triple-
check. Then I made him go back, get me the
printout, and show me how negative it was.
Completely negative. The original test
must have been a false positive, he said.
All my pap tests after that: negative.
I'm just now getting over the shock and
pain of thinking I was living with an STD.
What have I taken away from it? People need
to realize it can happen to them (80 percent
of the population is likely to get it by the
time they're 50), but it doesn't have to. There
is a vaccine that greatly reduces a person's
chances of contracting HPV. I'm signed up
to get it. I'm going to do everything I can to
make sure I don't rejoin that silent majority.
- Arikia Milikan is a LSA Junior
and Daily staff reporter
F University Unions
League Pierpont Union