#CCAM is in full swing and today I want to share with you the story of a Cervivor Ambassador sister of mine, Danielle Sepulveres! She put out a great blog post this week about Cervical Cancer Awareness Month and how the princesses understand the importance of visiting your healthcare provider and taking measures to prevent HPV and cancer. You should understand the importance of these things too!
I asked her if she could tell us a little about herself so I could use it on the blog today, I also wanted to share her special post with you. Please take a moment to check out her fabulous blog post, as well as the time to read her story below. - Erica
“I’d rather regret the things I’ve done than regret the things I haven’t done.”–Lucille Ball
This quote is very important to me. For most of my life I’ve been more of the mindset that there’s no such thing as a “regret”. I prefer to interpret everything as an experience that leads me to new knowledge or providing a lesson necessary to continue onward and hopefully upward.
I spent most of my childhood into early adulthood trying to wrap my head around always doing the right thing. With a Jewish mother and Catholic father (and known amongst my friends as a Cashew or Pizzabagel) I had two times the guilt weighing on my conscience. And I barely ever even set foot into a religious establishment!
As strait edge as possible, I didn’t even have a legitimate experience with intoxication (that’s my obnoxious way of saying getting drunk) until I was almost eighteen. Meanwhile most of my friends had been experimenting with alcohol since the age of thirteen. And when it came to sex? Forget it! I believed for a long time that I would wait for marriage since that seemed like the “right thing” to do. Health class in school perpetuated this idea in the manner of scaring the hell out of me with only one of two options resulting from sex. Pregnancy or death. Literally. That was what I gleaned from health class. Sex before marriage equals pregnancy or death. Or possibly both. Coupled with my father’s infamous sex advice of “AIDS will kill you and herpes is forever” before shipping me off to college, I was really only equipped to make one decision. And that decision was to wait.
So I waited.
And then at the ripe old age of twenty-three I fell in love for the first time. He was twenty-eight and swooped in on me, tall, handsome and smooth–which coincidentally was even his nickname (and should have tipped me off). We had an intense physical attraction to each other, which in my inexperience coaxed me into believing he loved me as much as I loved him.
I could go into the details of our tumultuous romance but suffice it to say that it was a dangerous combination of love and infatuation that I believe happens to everyone at least once in their life. The kind of intoxicating love that makes every decision tie back to that person and you start to lose your sense of self and who you are without them.
During this time I went for my annual check-up at my gynecologist and was told that something had come up irregular in my Pap test. A couple more Pap tests and a biopsy of my cervix confirmed that I in fact was positive for HPV and potentially at risk for cervical cancer if my body didn’t clear it.
WHAT. THE. HELL.
That pretty fairly sums up my initial reaction to the diagnosis. I had waited. I had slept with one person. I had used condoms. I had been monogamous. Where did I go wrong??!
And the answer is that HPV doesn’t care. It doesn’t care if you’ve slept your way through a frat house in college or if you’re a fifty year old woman who’s been married to the same man for twenty two years. Or if you’re twenty-three like I was and think you’ve found the guy who will put a shiny diamond ring on your finger. That was my first wake up call. I had been in my smug little sheltered world of making “right” decisions and now was thrust into a parallel universe where people assumed I slept around and I personally felt damaged and alone.
After two unsuccessful rounds of cryosurgery–liquid nitrogen being shot up inside me to freeze the pre-cancerous cells and one LEEP procedure–a minor surgical removal of the tip of my cervix–I was soon out of the woods in terms of danger. But my life felt completely different.
I realized part of my anger, sadness, frustration and numerous other emotions stemmed from an adolescent urge to stamp my foot and yell, “It’s not fair!” It’s not fair that in my early twenties when I was just discovering myself and what I wanted in life, this huge unexpected roadblock came out of nowhere to derail my confidence, my health and potentially my future. How could I date again after this? How could I not panic the next time I wanted to engage in an intimate relationship? What would happen when I got married one day and wanted to have children? I didn’t have any answers.
But life isn’t fair. We all know that. But we also feel invincible when we’re young. HPV was something that would happen to someone else, not me. And so was cancer. But I have friends who have had radical hysterectomies at the age of twenty-five because of cervical cancer. They too believed, these are the kinds of things that happen to other people. Not them.
I truly believe that one day with all the information we have and the building towards education and awareness, one day cervical cancer won’t be something that happens to anyone anymore.
So I don’t regret what I experienced. I don’t regret all the nights I cried myself to sleep, terrified of test results and doctor’s appointments and uncomfortable procedures. I don’t regret meeting the guy who would turn out to be emotionally manipulative and flip my life upside down at such a young age. I feel lucky that I cleared the virus, and learned to be an advocate for women’s health.
I would only regret if I had chosen to not speak out. It’s important to me to make sure no one ever has to feel like I did. And I don’t even regret the crushing loneliness I felt at that time. Because it’s that feeling that drives me to continue onward in this journey. And hopefully upward.
I asked her if she could tell us a little about herself so I could use it on the blog today, I also wanted to share her special post with you. Please take a moment to check out her fabulous blog post, as well as the time to read her story below. - Erica
“I’d rather regret the things I’ve done than regret the things I haven’t done.”–Lucille Ball
This quote is very important to me. For most of my life I’ve been more of the mindset that there’s no such thing as a “regret”. I prefer to interpret everything as an experience that leads me to new knowledge or providing a lesson necessary to continue onward and hopefully upward.
I spent most of my childhood into early adulthood trying to wrap my head around always doing the right thing. With a Jewish mother and Catholic father (and known amongst my friends as a Cashew or Pizzabagel) I had two times the guilt weighing on my conscience. And I barely ever even set foot into a religious establishment!
As strait edge as possible, I didn’t even have a legitimate experience with intoxication (that’s my obnoxious way of saying getting drunk) until I was almost eighteen. Meanwhile most of my friends had been experimenting with alcohol since the age of thirteen. And when it came to sex? Forget it! I believed for a long time that I would wait for marriage since that seemed like the “right thing” to do. Health class in school perpetuated this idea in the manner of scaring the hell out of me with only one of two options resulting from sex. Pregnancy or death. Literally. That was what I gleaned from health class. Sex before marriage equals pregnancy or death. Or possibly both. Coupled with my father’s infamous sex advice of “AIDS will kill you and herpes is forever” before shipping me off to college, I was really only equipped to make one decision. And that decision was to wait.
So I waited.
And then at the ripe old age of twenty-three I fell in love for the first time. He was twenty-eight and swooped in on me, tall, handsome and smooth–which coincidentally was even his nickname (and should have tipped me off). We had an intense physical attraction to each other, which in my inexperience coaxed me into believing he loved me as much as I loved him.
I could go into the details of our tumultuous romance but suffice it to say that it was a dangerous combination of love and infatuation that I believe happens to everyone at least once in their life. The kind of intoxicating love that makes every decision tie back to that person and you start to lose your sense of self and who you are without them.
During this time I went for my annual check-up at my gynecologist and was told that something had come up irregular in my Pap test. A couple more Pap tests and a biopsy of my cervix confirmed that I in fact was positive for HPV and potentially at risk for cervical cancer if my body didn’t clear it.
WHAT. THE. HELL.
That pretty fairly sums up my initial reaction to the diagnosis. I had waited. I had slept with one person. I had used condoms. I had been monogamous. Where did I go wrong??!
And the answer is that HPV doesn’t care. It doesn’t care if you’ve slept your way through a frat house in college or if you’re a fifty year old woman who’s been married to the same man for twenty two years. Or if you’re twenty-three like I was and think you’ve found the guy who will put a shiny diamond ring on your finger. That was my first wake up call. I had been in my smug little sheltered world of making “right” decisions and now was thrust into a parallel universe where people assumed I slept around and I personally felt damaged and alone.
After two unsuccessful rounds of cryosurgery–liquid nitrogen being shot up inside me to freeze the pre-cancerous cells and one LEEP procedure–a minor surgical removal of the tip of my cervix–I was soon out of the woods in terms of danger. But my life felt completely different.
I realized part of my anger, sadness, frustration and numerous other emotions stemmed from an adolescent urge to stamp my foot and yell, “It’s not fair!” It’s not fair that in my early twenties when I was just discovering myself and what I wanted in life, this huge unexpected roadblock came out of nowhere to derail my confidence, my health and potentially my future. How could I date again after this? How could I not panic the next time I wanted to engage in an intimate relationship? What would happen when I got married one day and wanted to have children? I didn’t have any answers.
But life isn’t fair. We all know that. But we also feel invincible when we’re young. HPV was something that would happen to someone else, not me. And so was cancer. But I have friends who have had radical hysterectomies at the age of twenty-five because of cervical cancer. They too believed, these are the kinds of things that happen to other people. Not them.
I truly believe that one day with all the information we have and the building towards education and awareness, one day cervical cancer won’t be something that happens to anyone anymore.
So I don’t regret what I experienced. I don’t regret all the nights I cried myself to sleep, terrified of test results and doctor’s appointments and uncomfortable procedures. I don’t regret meeting the guy who would turn out to be emotionally manipulative and flip my life upside down at such a young age. I feel lucky that I cleared the virus, and learned to be an advocate for women’s health.
I would only regret if I had chosen to not speak out. It’s important to me to make sure no one ever has to feel like I did. And I don’t even regret the crushing loneliness I felt at that time. Because it’s that feeling that drives me to continue onward in this journey. And hopefully upward.
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