Her youth has cut her life short.
After experiencing constant, severe bleeding and back pain, Paige Hart, 25, was diagnosed in November with cervical cancer. Following chemotherapy, she was told she was cured, but then the pain returned, and doctors discovered the cancer had, too. It had spread to her neck lymph nodes, chest and stomach.
Almost as bad as the Nottingham, UK, native’s incurable diagnosis is that she feels her fate was avoidable — if her doctors had conducted a Pap smear.
“I was only 24 at the time, and I suspect that they just thought I was too young to get something like cervical cancer,” Hart tells Caters News.
“I was constantly bleeding. I went to the doctor, but they just palmed me off with [pain pills].”
Hart had to go to the doctor four times before they realized her condition was far worse than an inflamed pelvis — it was aggressive, stage-3 cervical cancer.
In England, Pap smears aren’t offered by the National Health Service until women are 25. If they were given to younger women, Hart contends, doctors would have caught her cancer before it spread. (In the US, a majority of women 18 and older get regular Pap smears, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)
“I feel like the NHS have let me down,” she says. “If I’d have had a smear test a few years ago, the cancer would definitely have been found.”
Now, she’s advocating for Paps to be given to younger women. “I think the age needs to be lowered to when people are first sexually active,” Hart says.
Some medical professionals, however, argue that the combination of HPV vaccinations and the relative rarity of cancer at such a young age make lowering the age threshold unnecessary.
“Almost all cervical cancers are caused by the human papillomavirus … If we were to screen women under 25, these changes could lead to unnecessary and harmful tests and treatments,” says Anne Mackie, program director of the UK National Screening Committee.
International researchers announced in June that they were on the verge of eliminating cervical cancer after tracking 65 studies involving more than 60 million people across 14 countries who received the HPV vaccine.
Over the course of eight years, they found that HPV 16 and 18 — the two strains that cause 70 percent of cervical cancers — dropped 83 percent in girls ages 13 to 19 and 66 percent in women ages 20 to 24, according to the World Health Organization study published in The Lancet.
Hart takes little solace in such expert opinions.
“I need to live every day now like it’s my last. It’s been a really terrible year,” she says. “I’m living a half life. I can’t plan for anything. I don’t know what’s going to happen at all.”
