Hello,
I was wondering if anyone has any experience of your cervical cancer diagnosis being missed by the screening system? Either missed altogether or caught later than early treatment / monitoring than should have realistically been the case? It’s a part of my diagnosis that I have struggled to come to terms with and I haven’t come across anyone in the same boat so sometimes feels very isolating. In my case it was missed because I was only screened for HPV (as is now the general protocol) which came back negative - but it was a “false negative.” As I wasn’t tested for abnormal cells I was just sent on my way even though I would have realistically had invasive cancer at the point of my smear test, meaning it was only found once it was a lot more advanced, via symptoms.
Interested to hear if anyone else has had any sort of similar experiences so as to hopefully feel a bit less alone with it all!
Hi Joey987
I haven’t been in the same situation, but I hope you’ll get some more replies now I’ve nudged your post up to the top again.
I’m really sorry to read your cancer was missed in screening-I’ve had concerns since the new protocol for testing was adopted where there’s no cell testing when ladies have an hpv negative test. I appreciate that the percentage of cancers which are non-hpv driven is small, but as your situation has shown, testing itself is not infallible, and symptoms are not always present with early invasive cancer.
Prior to my own diagnosis, I was very naive about cervical screening and always thought it was a test for cervical cancer, which of course it really isn’t.
It must be hard to live with the knowledge that cancer could have been identified earlier for you, especially when we are encouraged to go for testing when called up for it and assume everything is ok when we are told we don’t need further testing.
Sarah xx
