Cervical abnormalities: CIN3 and CGIN

Gillian: I think the nurse badgered me to get a smear done, to get a smear test done, and I wasn’t going to. And she was on at me every time. And I think I was going to Thailand and I was getting some injections for holiday, and that's why, she said to me ‘‘well while you are here why don’t you just get this done. I’ve sent you a few letters and you’ve ignored them.” So I think then it was only because she  was so relaxed about it and made a normal, that I did get it done.

Sam: So I went back again, and she did another biopsy and everything, and then for some reason I don’t know why but I got transferred to another consultant. And as far I know he was a bit higher in the hospital, a higher consultant. So I thought right, a bit of a fresh start. I'm going to go in and I'm going to ask the questions that I want to ask and try to see if I could find out, because it's like it was a year and a half that I’d been going through it and still got all these abnormal cells and everything. And it really was affecting me, I was worried, really worried.

Rachel: I was told not to Google, which I didn't. I went home and just lay in the bath and then then [my partner] came back and he had a look on the internet and said “Rachel, it’s not that bad.  A severe result is very treatable.”

Sandra: She didn't take long. It was just like a smear it’s not difficult, very easy. She did very quick. So it’s like a smear went in there, snip. But that's all you know, you don’t even feel the snip,  you put to yourself that it’s going to be a snip. It felt twinge like a pain and that was it. That was the pain about.

Michelle: I have to say that from my experience of my GP, I don’t think I could have got through the whole process and I don’t think I would be at here today talking in the way that I am if I didn’t have such a fantastic GP.

I did visit other GPs in the practice, and although they were fine, they didn’t really cater to the emotional side. It was kind of very much like, you know, you’ve had CIN3 and now it’s been treated, so that's fine. But they didn’t really understand the emotional side effects and the impact that it had.