‘I just ignored the pile of letters’: As cervical cancer rates rise why are women avoiding smear tests?

When the letter arrived through her front door, Marianne Nicholson did not open it. The 43-year-old from Northern Ireland knew what the envelope contained and had already decided that after a previous smear test when the nurse chastised her for bleeding, she wouldn’t be responding to future invitations. Nicholson had tried to explain it wasn’t her period but spotting caused by her contraceptive pill, but the nurse had already terminated the procedure. “She [the nurse] was annoyed and I was really embarrassed. After that I disliked smears so much,” she tells me. Read here…