Jane Foster was like most hardworking Aussie mums – always on the go, looking after everyone else and having very little time to herself.
In fact, she kept putting off her regular Pap test because she simply didn’t have time to visit her doctor.
“I had been through a divorce, my parents had died and I was raising two teenage daughters. So life was busy,” explains the 45-year-old nurse from Melbourne. “Before all that happened, I used to have a Pap test every second year, without fail.”
Jane never imagined she would get sick, and it was only ever a routine check-up. But one day five years ago she dislocated her shoulder playing basketball. As she was forced to take time off work to recuperate, she made use of the opportunity to catch up on all the little things she had been putting off – such as a Pap test.
When she went back for the results, the doctor told her they were abnormal. “But I wasn’t totally concerned,” she says. “The doctor told me not to stress too much and that I’d have to see a gynaecologist.”
For the next three weeks, Jane’s life was a frightening blur. The gynaecologist performed a cone biopsy – which confirmed that she had cervical cancer – then removed the cancerous part of the cervix.
“But two days later, he phoned to say the cells had spread further than they had thought and I would need to see an oncologist,” Jane says. “I remember thinking, ‘This is much more serious than I thought.'”
After Jane consulted the oncologist, she agreed her best option was to undergo a total hysterectomy.
“I already had my beautiful girls – Kellie, who’s 18, and Jodie, 17 – so I was happy to get rid of my uterus,” says Jane. “I wasn’t using it.”
On September 21, 1998, she had her operation and was in the Royal Women’s Hospital for a week.
She went home and spent the next six weeks without driving or taking on anything too strenuous.
“The time from that first appointment to the operation was only three weeks,” says Jane, who was given the all-clear by her doctors in November. “But then I was off work for six months.
“The irony is that I thought for so long I didn’t even have a spare half-hour for a Pap test. That attitude ended up costing me six months … but it could have cost my life.”
Did you know?
— Cervical cancer accounts for 1.9 percent of all cancers in Australia.
— About 745 new cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed each year and around 265 women die from cervical cancer each year.
— Australian women have one-in-170 risk of getting cervical cancer before the age of 75 and one-in-493 risk of dying from cervical cancer before the age of 75.
(Source: Cancer in Australia 2000 — a publication of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and the Australian Association of Cancer Registries.)
When to have a Pap test?
The Cancer Council Australia supports the policy of the National Cervical Screening Program, which is that all women between the ages of 18 and 70 should have a Pap smear every two years. You can obtain more information by calling the council’s Cancer Helpline on 131 120 or visiting these websites:
www.cervicalscreen.health.gov.au
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