How HPV Can Play Out Over Your Lifetime
- By
Julia Austin
Source: davidf / Getty
TBH, it’s never really over
If you have a strain of high-risk HPV, you might want to mentally prepare for this being something that you have to monitor and manage throughout your life. It may not present symptoms for years at a time but then come back out of the blue. It may come back presenting more advanced lesions than the last time, or less advanced lesions. You may have to (or want to) get more frequent pap smears than most of your friends. Cervical cancer is highly preventable, but if you have high-risk HPV, that prevention is on you to do regular screenings, and follow your doctor’s recommendations for follow-up tests and procedures. After reading this, it’s easy to see how HPV can go quickly from “no big deal” to a pretty damn big deal.
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