Two weeks ago, spurred by a long week of general artistic ennui and encouraged by a conversation with former editor/current writing cheerleader, Otis- I put my name in for an open editing position for a listicle website that shall remain nameless.

No, it wasn’t Buzzfeed, I wish it were Buzzfeed. Getting rejected from Buzzfeed would be like getting slapped in the face by Regina George- it’s still awesome.

I was contacted right away and asked to participate in a phone interview. My boyfriend, who has a degree in Economics and is therefore my source on all things Grown-Up Business, assured me that this was a good sign. I wanted to believe it was a good sign. I wanted to believe that my years of writing meant something to someone, somewhere. Even if that “somewhere” was a website with headlines that read “10 Most TMI Jennifer Lawrence Facts” and “Things You Didn’t Know About Sports Injuries”.

I was definitely at #1 on “Top 10 Places to Scrape the Bottom of the Barrel” but I wanted a job in writing. Any job in writing. To have that job would mean that I was an official writer ™ and that hat my father bought me from the Writer’s Store wasn’t complete bullshit. I wouldn’t feel bad when my ex told me about his screenplay or when I saw my old Second City classmates in their own sketch shows and I definitely wouldn’t take it personally when a sales rep referred to me at “the gal at the front desk”.

So I emailed back, I had my boyfriend triple-check a message that said only, “5:30 works for me. Talk to you then.”

Here is a thing I learned: There are such things as companies that are too young.

I learned that when I spoke to someone whose name could have easily been either Brandon, Tucker, Hunter or Tyler. Branler spoke in the slow and unimpressed drawl of every dude in film school that wanted to tell me that whatever I thought I knew about Citizen Kane was wrong.

“So tell me about your Medium.”

“Well, I have a readership of a little over 5000 people. It’s mostly comedy. I use it as a standing portfolio of all my work.”

“So some of this stuff was like, random pieces you couldn’t sell to publications?”

“No, I chose not to sell them and just share them with my readers.”

“Oh.”

Tyndon invited me to do an editing trial. It was supposed to take eight hours but I did it in four, emailing copious notes on listicles about shows that weren’t even on the air anymore.

I waited a week.

I was told that it was a pass for the full-time editing position but I was welcome to submit freelance pieces for $40 an article. If you are wondering what my day rate is to write about January Jones’ hairstyles (blonde, also blonde, slightly less blonde, more blonde but then in a ponytail), it’s not $40.

I did not respond. Instead I ordered $20 worth of waffles and chicken to my office and ate them while expertly ignoring the screaming artists’ doubt in my head.

Was this it for me?

Did this mean that I was so bad of a writer that I couldn’t even get a job editing stories likely rejected from Cracked?

Was I supposed to now spend the rest of my life printing and collating things? Really? Was this what I was meant to do?

Not that any of it mattered because those questions were quickly replaced by a flood of new information that I also learned in the span of one week.

1. A Colposcopy is when they pour vinegar down your lady-hallway to see if any cells are wearing leather jackets and listening to the devil’s music or otherwise acting abnormally.

2. They look at those cells by putting a microscope in that same hallway.

3. When those cells are inevitably found, likely flipping off the microscope, your lady doctor tells you that you need a biopsy.

4. You say “Okay, sure,” because you don’t know what a biopsy is. BAD MOVE, SUGARPEA.

5. A biopsy is when the doctor takes something that looks like Iron Man’s pinky had a baby with an ear-piercing gun from Claire’s and literally pulls out a piece of your cervix.

6. I bleed a lot.

7. You are given one measly Motrin and go into shock and a nice nurse named Fatima brings you Tree Top apple juice.

8. Tree Top apple juice still comes in those cute little cans.

9. You go home and cry and miss your friend’s Korean BBQ birthday dinner party that you were really looking forward to.

I spent more time than I should formulating a fitting obituary, should I be killed by my abnormal cells and lack of talent:

The Henry family mourns the loss of their daughter and chief eater of all the food in the pantry, Devon. While she was better known as “the gal at the front desk”, she longed to write and have people tell her how funny she was and how pretty her natural hair color was. Sadly she was so profoundly untalented that the lack of talent actually created abnormal cells in her lady-business and she died. She is survived by her dog, Lucyfer “Lucy” Claire Boudicca and three cans of unopened Diet Coke.

The results came back. CIN I and CIN II, “the potentially premalignant transformation and abnormal growth (dysplasia) of squamous cells on the surface of the cervix.”

It’s not cancer, but eventually it might be. It’s curable, even.

I would have to have the LEEP procedure.

The LEEP procedure is when they take an electrical wire and cut one, or in my case, four coin-sized pieces of tissue with abnormal cells. It is relatively safe. I’d have a local anasthetic. It would not affect my long-term plans of having children and dressing them in gender-neutral, dinosaur-themed baby clothes and giving them ridiculous names.

Still, the night before I sat sobbing in my bathroom with my Granny’s rose-pink rosary wrapped around my fingers imagining all the ways I would never have a daughter named Julia Tyrannosaur until my boyfriend found me. Placated with a sympathy burrito from him, I went to bed.

I got dressed the day of like it was a ritual. Like I was off to some battle from which I wasn’t sure I would return. If I could, I would have painted my face in swirling blue warpaint like a screaming druid facing down some smug centurion.

My grandfather’s old fisherman sweater, boots from my Maggie Greene cosplay, socks with tiny Tyrranosaurs on them, my Miraculous Medal from the Vatican, a small charm of a Raven perched beneath a triple moon, a ring my mother bought me from a silver cart in Santa Barbara in 1998, red lipstick…

I kept saying the diagnosis to myself. If I could say the whole thing without tripping over my tongue, somehow I’d gain mastery of the diagnosis. It would go away. They wouldn’t have to use a terrifying alien probe to cauterize my business.

Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia

Cervical Intra-

Intraepi-

Epith-ept-

Fuck.

My boyfriend drove me. We waited in the waiting room. I watched pregnant women, happy women with empire waist dresses and swollen feet, shuffle in and out and I envied them. Motherhood must be terrifying in its own way but at least it was a familiar fear. I’ve always talked myself down from gut-wrenching, heave-inducing cramps by telling myself that whatever I felt, some other woman with my eyes and my face and strangely long finger-toes hundreds of years ago had felt as well.

This time the thought of some viking woman bearing down and pushing out a pasty, under-cooked loaf of baby out on some fjord didn’t bring me any comfort. Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia wasn’t a thing back then. I’d have just died- if childbirth, a bad cold or being a mouthy woman hadn’t done me in first.

Heather, a kind nurse with sunflowers tattoed on her arm, called me to the back. She had me undress from the waist down and put a sheet of rose-pink tissue paper across my lap. It was the same color as my rosary.

My doctor came in. She asked me how I was and I am sure there is a better way to address a woman who’s spent the better part of her adult years in medical school to earn a highly advanced degree but all I could say was, “I’m very terrified and I’d like to squeeze the shit out of something right now.”

Heather offered me her hand.

I didn’t feel the injection of lidocaine. My mouth tasted like metal and I felt nothing. Everything seemed louder: the whir of the machine, the hum of the vacuum meant to suck the smell of burning from the air, the squeak of non-skid sneakers on the linoleum outside. I thought of how my mother said she could hear R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” playing all the way from the nurses’ station as she went into labor with me.

“Is that me? That burning smell.”

“Well… yes. Technically.”

“This reminds me of a documentary on Scottish witch trials I watched a few nights ago.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, there was a castle in Edinburgh that smelled like burned bacon for months in the 1700s because they’d burned so many witches.”

“This makes you think of burning witches?”

“A little, but to be fair, I think about witches a lot.”

I realized this was a weird thing to talk about to anyone, let alone someone essentially treating you to a lightsaber tampon. I told myself I’d have to google if you can get high from local anesthetic then promptly forgot.

And then it was over. I was told not to wear tampons for a month. I couldn’t take a bath or go swimming. I could not have sex. I assured her that I wanted to do none of those things. I wanted to eat In n Out in bed. I wanted to pet my dog.

“Thank you for being so understanding.”

“There’s nothing to understand. This is why we’re here. To catch this early. And we did.”

Afterwards my mother came out to see me and get me settled. She brought Lucy and a Double Double with onions, no tomato. I slept for two days. I went back to work.

I learned a week later that my LEEP had come back negative for malignancy or residual dysplasia. I’ll have to get a pap every year, but that’s a good habit to have anyway. And, the smell of burning vagina aside, it was an okay experience. It wouldn’t be my go-to for Friday night fun, but it certainly wasn’t the terrifying medieval procedure women on motherhood message boards made it out to be. My uterus didn’t fall out. I got In n Out. I didn’t have cancer.

And I hadn’t thought of that stupid listicle site once.

Author’s note: I decided to tell this long and rather involved story for a lot of reasons. Because I’m an oversharer, mostly. But also because September is Gynecologic Cancer Awareness Month. I was staring down a scary diagnosis, one that I knew little about- but I was lucky to have a compassionate and brilliant doctor who caught it early and shut that whole mess down. It is important to speak frankly about our reproductive health. It is imperative.

I wrote this for people with cervixes (cervi? cerveese?) and their corresponding parts and attached reproductive organs. I know paps aren’t fun. But please, take care of yourself. Get your yearly physical. Stay on top of it. For me.