I started International Women’s Day by having a smear test. I guess in some twisted, far-fetched way, it is a form of self-care, after all.
In many ways, today was far from an ideal day for me to do this thing – not because it’s International Women’s Day, but because it’s my monthly deadline in work, a day I when I’m responsible for quality checking in excess of 120 pages of printed content, all while responding in a reasonably diplomatic way to more or less concerned emails from a number of other people invested in the content of said 120-plus pages. This monthly deadline, needless to say, is typically preceded by two or three equally full-on days, causing me to enter what one could refer to as print-deadline mode – a state that makes anyone who knows me run and hide. It is not, to be clear, the time for hanging around a GP surgery – but as you know if you’ve ever booked in for a smear, these things are best done at certain times of the month, and menstrual cycles don’t care about print deadlines.
This particular print deadline, as it happens, both my husband and my children had indeed run and hid, and I had a rare chance of an ever-so-slight lie-in – or I would’ve had, had it not been for this appointment to get a medical device similar to, but larger than, a garlic press shoved up my nether regions. I would’ve also had an entire evening to work on the aforementioned quality checking and maybe just chill with a bit of Netflix on my own for a while, had it not been for the fact that Virgin Media had just dropped off a new router, which apparently they do sometimes, causing the WiFi to go down and the smart TV with it – something I of course didn’t realise, because their service is so unreliable anyway, until after about an hour of phone tethering and desperately trying but failing to send huge files. This left me staring at the box with the new router, feeling like a bad, bad feminist, thinking that if I couldn’t get this thing working, then was it even International Women’s Day tomorrow at all? It was 10pm by the time I finally sat down, determined to watch something rather than going to bed, just for the hell of it and to celebrate my new status as good, self-sufficient feminist.
Back to the smear: in I went this morning, tired but armed with advice from my women’s health physiotherapist about the breathing I should be doing in advance of the procedure and the requests I should be making about the tools used and manners applied. To those who’ve had a smear test, this might sound a little excessive – but suffice to say I’ve had enough going on with my lady bits recently, and I wasn’t going to take the risk of causing further damage just to sample some tissue that would most likely end up getting lost on the way to the laboratory anyway.
I was brought in to a tiny room where a nurse took my details. “Say that again, sorry?” she said, staring confused at the screen. “Oh I’m sorry, you’re not actually due until the 16th, which is… oh that’s next Saturday! But you can just come back then, or if you want you can pay €50 and I’ll do it now?”
Take a week’s worth of stress, a dose of tiredness, nerves about the procedure itself, a bit of PMS and years’ worth of rage about the unacceptable state of our healthcare system, then add a few months of bad pelvic health news and a nurse asking me to come back during my period, after her colleague had specifically advised me not to book in for that particular time – and I lost it. I lost it, and I cried, and I knew it wasn’t her fault but it was the final straw: it was yet another piece of evidence of a broken system that fails women every day, one that failed women who are no longer with us, and their families, and every woman who has since lost faith in the system. It was the last tiny little poke that pushed me over the edge, and I was so angry I couldn’t even talk to her; I was angry about how I’d been dismissed the last time I’d been there, about how I’d been nervous for nothing, about the lie-in I didn’t get and the deep breathing I’d done in the waiting room – and I was raging over the absolute cheek of her to ask me for €50 when the smear test I’d had done three years previously might’ve never even had accurate results in the first place.
But just as I stood up and walked out, she said “Wait!” and she apologised and begged me to come back. “Let’s cheat the system. Sometimes you have to.”
The breathing was fine. The procedure was fine. It was all fine – bar the risk that the swab will be refused and I’ll have to go back for a repeat test in the summer – but I felt mortified. I had cried my way to a free smear test a week early, and it felt petty and unnecessary and deeply humiliating. “Oh, and if you don’t hear from us within three months, give me a call. These things have a tendency to go missing,” she said as I walked out the door.
Happy International Women’s Day, Mná na hÉireann.
