Smear

From what I know from other members here, the monthly cycle can certainly have an effect on symptoms. Also you are still in the PP healing period, and your activities are changing all the time with a growing babe. Stick with good WW posture and protect that lumbar curvature in all that you do.

Are you talking about a PAP test? Is there a particular reason or does your doc just think it's time? I don't think this will affect your prolapse. - Surviving

I had a Pap test last year in the spring, and things were all ready pretty low and slouchy down there, and it didn't affect me at all. I don't know what it is like for post partum though, because I didn't have any prolapse symptoms that I can remember.
I had mine because it was 3 year due date on getting one.
I don't know how most ladies feel about getting these tests, but I have always heard that cervical cancer is the most treatable and early detection is the most helpful. So, I pretty much got them during most of my 20s and 30s. I was more lazy in my forties; now I don't know what to think about it. I was told when I got mine that younger women were more susceptible to cervical cancer because of more of a chance of having multiple partners.
Should we have them? Guess it is something to investigate. But, like I said, it didn't affect my prolapse at all.

Pap is the same as cervical smear. At least when I was younger, here in America, I had to have one every year during my 20s, and then it was more stretched out after that. I would definetly talk to your doctor about your concerns about the test, maybe thye will try to be more gentle with you.I remember back then feeling a little achey afterwards. As I got older it didn't feel like anything different afterwards.
Periods are still hard on my uterus. I have a very low prolapse of the uterus, and I get a dragging feeling during my period, and then I can't wait for it to be over so I can get some good firebreathing in which really helps pull my uterus back up more.
Wishing you the best.

Interesting idea that younger women are more likely to get cervical cancer because they are more likely to have multiple sexual partners. Really? I think that is a long shot. People who are younger now didn't invent sexual enjoyment, did they? Fear of pregnancy and STD's has always been a pretty poor motivator for abstinence. Sure, The Pill makes it 'safer' pregnancy-wise for women to have sex, but sexually transmissible diseases like HPV virus are not prevented by being on The Pill. You have to use condoms to lessen the likelihood of getting them, and even then, HPV can hide in other parts of the genitals not covered by the condom. There are definitely more cases of genital warts in younger people. Warts are the way HPV seems to most commonly show up, but they do clear up. The person can still pass on the HPV, but is less likely to have wart outbreaks as they get older. HPV can be detected in all or nearly all cases of cervical cancer, but I don't think they have established yet the *exact* nature of the causal relationship between the two.

Here is a pretty good brochure about HPV, http://www.hawaii.edu/hivandaids/A%20Patient%20Guide%20%20%20HPV%20in%20... .

Here is a page about the link between cervical cancer and HPV, http://www.cancerscreening.gov.au/internet/screening/publishing.nsf/Cont...$File/hpv.pdf .

Anyway, if you contract HPV when you are young, you are still carrying it around when you are old. HPV seems to make it more likely that women will get cervical cancer, but cervical cancer doesn't always develop, and it is not contagious in itself.

Australia has been pretty advanced with cervical cancer research, so this will be the good oil, but get materials that are about your own country or State to find out what immunisation arrangements there are, if you are looking at immunisation as an option for preventing cervical cancer.

Louise

Thanks for the clarification on cervical cancer. When I went in for my exam last spring, I was only loaded with information about perimenopause and environmental estrogens making it worse; and no to low dose birth control, and no to low dose antidepressants. The Pap smear question was really an after-thought while I was there. Why was it that as a young woman I had to have them every year, and now as an older woman is it every 3 years? Sounds like it is different in different countries as far as how often we have them.
It still didn't affect my prolapse though, it just kept slumping along at its own pace.

There is a lot of confusion about HPV not least in my own mind, but I was under the impression that the term referred to about a 100 viruses some of which are cancerous and that they are transmitted sexually. The cancerous ones making up some 70 per cent of cervical cancers incidence worldwide.

I thought because young people had not developed a mature immunity to these viruses, this made them more vulnerable than older adults (who of course are not themselves necessarily immune) in the same way that the term ‘childhood illness’ does not mean they are harmless, but that children are susceptible to them to the point of mortality, and that also young people tend not to report these viruses because of youthful embarrassment and lack of private access to doctors and generally lack of knowledge. So catching HPV then would not be dependent on the number of sexual partners that you had per se, although that naturally would increase your risk, but a bit of (increasingly common) bad luck. HPV infection is most common in people in their late teens and early 20s.

It was also assumed that if young women were vaccinated, then young men would be protected, however this is proving not the case for a number of reasons; including sex with unimmunized foreigners by backpackers and homosexuality. Again a sixteen year old bloke is not about to go to a doctor and say ‘look I have a different sexual preference to the majority’.

In Australia it is recommended that young women begin pap smears at 18 or two years after starting sexual activity. Even with the vaccine, regular cervical smears are still recommended for the vaccine covers only about six of the viruses, some considered harmless, some wart causing and some cancer causing. There is still 30% of cervical cancer viruses not covered by the vaccine. The vaccine is given to young women and girls as it is not effective where the girl has already been exposed to HPV.

My local doc reckoned we should keep having smears done till we are seventy, but I told her I thought she just made that up when I came in the door at age 66. She laughed. Knowing her, she will bring it up again.

Best wishes, Fab

Ok then, how do you ladies feel about mammograms? I have been hearing conflicting information on wether they are really effective or just a money making scheme from the medical community.
Here in the U.S. they want me to go in for one every year starting at the age of 40.

The problem for the breat screening seems to be that once a tumour is picked up there is no way of knowing whether it will develop into cancer or whether it will just go away. For every 2000 women screened one will avoid death, another 10 will receive treatment (have part or all of their breast removed) for something that was going to go away. Another 200 will experience great anxiety because of false positive readings. It is considered that screening leads to a 15% reduction in deaths. In Australia they claim 25%.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD001877.pub4/abstra...

With risk factors being a woman, age, family history or personal history of cancer, and other hormonal factors, I made the decision not to have pap smears or mammograms. But that was my decision. The high anxiety level which such tests which were random and in my case had no real basis in history, aroused in me, I considered not worth the risk.

But these must be personal decisions based on reasonable risk assessment. If women in my family had had cancer, I most probably would have made another decision.

But no, to answer your other question, I don’t think it is just a money making scheme. In Australia it is funded out of tax payer money and costs the user directly nil. I think it was a genuine attempt to pick up the signs of cancer at an early stage when the cancer was still treatable. It just did not take into account, the psychological fall-out for those whose lives were affected by it to varying degrees and it takes time for a cost/benefit analysis to gain support.

The 40-65 age group are the most vulnerable to breast cancer.

Cheers, Fab.

I certainly understand the psychological fall out of this test. My mom always had cysts in her breasts, so when I had my first mammogram around the age of 40, they did find a lump, and did say that it was probably a cyst, but that didn't make me feel any better while I waited 2 weeks for an ultrasound to tell me yes it was just a cyst. Consequently, I didn't have another for 4 years after that experience. I have had a few more after that, and just got my letter in the mail for the next one, but just don't know if I want to keep doing it.

My understanding is that a woman's breasts are too dense to make mammograms practical until she starts perimenopause. For those of you who have not had a mammogram they squash your breast flat between two plates, to get everything in focus, which is found excruciating until I was about 53, just before menopause at 56. My breasts were very dense before menopause, or so they said. Maybe they were just normal?

On the other hand, maybe that's why older women have floppy breasts, somewhat similar to chicken schnitzels? It is probably caused by too many mammograms while our breasts were young and solid! ;-) . Several years postmenopause I am still not keen to go back and have another one.