The first time I went I was about twenty three, twenty four, I wasn’t that young, I wasn’t a teenager or anything like that so I wasn’t really scared but I was very anxious because I had no idea what was going to happen. It was a female doctor and I’d organised it to be a female doctor and I went in to the normal doctor’s surgery and I had to get up on to the couch and she asked me to put my feet together and then she opened my legs at my knees and then she produced some sort of equipment that was a conical metal, conical shape with a screw on the side and then she inserted it in to my vagina and wound the screw to widen presumably my vagina in order to get to the cervix and then she got a wooden spatula and scraped my cervix which I could feel. It wasn’t painful but it was uncomfortable and all the time it was uncomfortable but not painful and she scraped at my cervix and then put it on a glass slide. I can’t remember if she put stain on it or something, but she put some sort of preserving thing on it and then slowly unwound the screw so the pressure was reduced and then took the instrument out and all I can remember it was very cold and uncomfortable but it wasn’t painful and it was over within, certainly within a minute and that was it, I had to put my pants back on and that was the end of the procedure.

She said that they would come through the post and they did. Although having said that though in my last smear I never received anything and they just said Well let you know if theres a problem, and I never ever heard anything so presumably there wasn’t a problem.

How did you feel about that?

What for the not receiving the results? Well I suppose after a while I’m, having had it done it, I sort of put it out of my mind but you know after a few weeks you wonder whether there is anything wrong with it or not. And then after a few months you think oh well there can’t be because they never contacted me. And I suppose because the last time I’d just had a baby I just was so busy I never gave it a second thought. But I think now if that were to happen again I think I’d probably make a phone call just to check. But in a different health authority, the two I had in a different health authority both times I received a letter through the post. Only a little slip basically saying my name, the date and the results that were negative and everything was okay and that was fine. Oh and at the bottom of the letter it actually said when your next one would be due as well.