I had a wonderful wedding, honeymoon and everything, then got pregnant. And then it just all went wrong. And I straight away thought it was linked to the laser therapy or that the cancerous cells had come back and they’d somehow killed the baby. I know it can’t possibly happen, but you have these crazy notions don’t you.

Anyway, so that was quite horrible as well and, because where I was at the time I went to hospital, and some of the nurses were quite nice and supportive but basically the procedure is called D & C. Can’t remember what it stands for. Basically they scrape out the lining of your womb and they called it, To remove the products of conception Which I think is a very horrible way of describing it and they should think of a better way.

The miscarriage was just a miscarriage. Nobody ever found out why not. Nobody tried to find out why not because very soon afterwards I got pregnant and I went to full term. It wasn’t a completely straightforward birth with my other daughter but she had a couple of weeks in the special care baby unit and then she was fine. And she’s absolutely fine now.

And a year later you were pregnant again?

And a year later I was pregnant again. Yeah, there’s 15 months between my two daughters. That wasn’t a totally normal birth either, but she came out in the end with the forceps and she’s absolutely fine now as well.

It [laser treatment] took much longer than I’d been expecting. It seemed like an hour but it probably wasn’t an hour. I can’t remember to be honest; this was 1983, a long time ago.

They said it would be like a heavy period. And, you know, normally my periods were five days and they were quite heavy anyway.

So I thought well not much to worry about there.

No.

It was completely different.

This was much heavier?

It was much heavier yeah. And they must’ve known because they have special sanitary towels that are only used for this thing. And they’re just enormous, you know, really huge and thick. And they gave me just a small packet of them to go home with so I thought, I was relieved it was a small packet. I thought that meant the bleeding would calm down and I could go onto normal sanitary towels. They told me I wouldn’t be able to use tampons. So fair enough.

But it was so bad that I was, I got to know the woman in my local pharmacy just around the corner from where I lived because I’d go in every day and get a new packet. I’d get lucozade because that was, you know, it’s meant to be an energy drink. It did
help me to kind of perk up a bit, better than coffee and stuff.

And you were off work for two weeks hoping to just recover a bit?

Yes.

But the bleeding continued for another four weeks after that?

Yes. It wasn’t as bad, I was able to go back to work.

And you were able to work or you just felt shattered at the end of the day?

Yeah. I could do my job but I couldn’t really do much else. Yeah, mainly on a weekend.

Then eventually did it taper off?

Yes, it got better, yeah.

Just very recently as well, when Jade Goody died, I became aware that there’s an age limit and they only do smear testing I think between the age of 25 and 60 is it?

64.

64. So I thought that was a bit worrying as well because I intend to live way past my 64th birthday. And I know from my own experience that, you know, I’m on a 20 year cycle for these cells. If it takes them 20 years to come back again, then you know I’ll be well into this time limit.

Also I have two daughters, and they’ve got boyfriends. One’s got several and one’s got a steady boyfriend. they’re still entitled, even though they’ve been on the pill for four, three years respectively because there’s a years age difference between them. You know, they’re not entitled to have smear tests and they might be you know, it might be something they’ve inherited from me. Or they just might get it anyway from other of these factors, so that seems a bit of a worry. What, you know, what will happen when I get older, and why are they too young? And that is a worry.

This time around people would say things like How are you feeling about it And I noticed a definite difference in all the medical staff. Maybe because it was in a different place, but I think because the thinking has moved on’ you can’t just treat the physical symptoms; you’ve got to think about how this woman’s feeling as well. And they made much more of an effort to explain the difference between the different stages of development and to say that it was at a stage where something would have to be done because the next stage was actually full blown cancer.

And you can imagine of course I was really dreading a repeat of the laser treatment. And I said if I have a choice I’m not having that, because I know you can’t have that under anaesthetic, and it was so painful and horrible. So what they decided to do was an operation called a LLETZ, and it’s a surgical incision. And it was very, extremely high tech this time around. I wasn’t doing the recording but he was filming. Well I don’t know if he was filming but he had a video camera so that I could look at the screen and see my cervix, and see when he painted the solution on. He said, All the cells that have got these changes, they’ll turn white

That was a much more positive experience. And although I had some bleeding afterwards, it didn’t go on for nearly as long. And they seemed to make me much more aware at each stage of what it would be like, and checked up on how I felt and stuff like that. And it wasn’t nice being in hospital overnight but they tried to make me kind of comfortable and reassured as possible, yeah. So that was much more positive.