I haven’t started with the six papers I’m due to submit next week. I had spent the whole day yesterday on a date with Bee with my intention of finishing at least one paper when I get home. Of course, I failed. I ended up sleeping at around 12 am, only to wake up quite a few times throughout the night.

We already started seeing patients as soon as we finished the exams and got back to business. There’s no time for us to relax a bit and unwind. Our exam finished on a Tuesday and right the next day we were scheduled to see a patient for Gynecology. I was wrong for having concluded that we weren’t going to see any patient for that sensitive subject. Just because the subject involved a lot vaginal exposures and examinations, a whole lot of privacy to be breached and awkwardness to deal with didn’t mean that we were exempt from getting our hands dirty. In fact, I had my hands fingers devirginized that same day by I performing the first IE of my career on a 44-year old patient complaining of reddish vaginal discharge. The feeling was… weird… and that funny search term that ended up in my other blog suddenly crossed my mind. Probably that person who had the nerve to search for that “fingering” term in Google was just curious to know how it felt like to the one doing the act. LOL.

The funny part of the experience, however, ends there. I don’t see any reason why we should be happier when our patient, as we would later on conclude, only has a few more months to live. She has cancer of the cervix – a lesion that was left undiscovered and untreated earlier because she never went to see a gynecologist and have a pap smear taken.

A lot of women die of cervical cancer because the disease is discovered only when it is already in its late stages – when things are already messier and harder to treat. However, this can be prevented by having a pap smear taken regularly especially for women who are considered high risk. These are women with positive family history of cancer, women who started having sex at an early age and women who has had multiple sexual partners. Exposure to the human papilloma virus (HPV) also increases the risk of a woman from developing cervical cancer much like how exposure to asbestos predisposes an individual from having mesothelioma later in life.

This patient of ours never had her pap smear taken. I know this is not exactly the most comfortable thing to have inside you in the world, but ladies, what’s a few minutes of discomfort if it meant our life?

unaware-soldierly