12 hours ago
Buckinghamshire cancer survivor says finally going to cervical screening 'saved' her life
ITV News Meridian's Wesley Smith spoke to a woman who says her life was saved by a cervical screening.
Home testing kits are to be offered to women who've consistently missed opportunities for cervical screening.
The news is welcomed by a mother from Buckinghamshire, who put off cervical screening and had to undergo life-saving treatment.
Toyah Myall, who's 33, had to live with the fear of not knowing what the future might hold for her backing an NHS campaign getting underway in the Thames Valley called, "Love Your Cervix" to encourage younger women to get checked as under 35s are the most vulnerable age group for a positive diagnosis of cervical cancer.
Family is everything to Toyah Myall from Aylesbury. So the thought that she might not be there to see her children grow up, because she'd put off cervical screening, was a wake-up call.
Ms Myall says her diagnosis would have been worse if she had left it any longer.
Toyah Myall said: "I didn't have a single symptom. Had I not gone, it could have been so much worse.
"Please, please go. I can't stress how important it is. It's uncomfortable, it's only two minutes, but it's going to save your life. It saved mine.
"I put it off for an awful long time, in actual fact, it was eight years, but now I sit here and think, gosh, I'm so lucky that it was just laser that was needed, there was no chemotherapy or anything and it could have been so much worse had I left it even longer.
"It was really difficult because having to explain to the children that actually something wasn't quite right with Mum and Mum needs to be seen by the doctors.
"Young people think, with cancer, death automatically and it was just reassuring them that wasn't the case. I was in good hands."
Toyah's condition was caught in the nick of time, but hundreds of other women, whose lives could potentially have been saved, die from the disease annually.
Athena Lamnisos from gynaecological cancer charity The Eve Appeal said: "It's theoretically an eliminable disease.
"Now, you can't say that about any other cancer type and we know how to detect cancer before it even starts with cell changes and that's part of the national cervical screening programme.
"If you do have symptoms, don't wait for a screening appointment, that's not what you need, you need to go and see a medical professional."
Cervical screenings are a preventative procedure and were formerly known as smear tests.
They involve collecting cells from the cervix to see if there's evidence of HPV, human papillomavirus, which can lead to cervical cancer.
Women aged between 25 and 64 are invited for regular screenings and trans men and non-binary people with a cervix are also eligible.
A third of those invited, do not book an appointment. The disease still kills 800 people a year.
