GARDASIL: To Vaccinate or Not to Vaccinate Against HPV

* It took me 11 months to get up the courage to write this post.  So if you need to be judgmental – fine, but keep it to yourself.  I’ve judged myself enough for all of us, thanks. *

I talk a lot with other parents about the woes we will face as parents of teenage daughters.  Often, the new vaccine GARDASIL comes up and we discuss whether or not we will vaccinate at the suggested age of twelve. 

There are many parents out there who plan to refuse the vaccine, stating that they will teach their daughters about abstinence, and therefore their child will not need it.  Further, I’ve heard that giving them the vaccine against HPV will give girls a false sense of security about sex in general.

Anytime I hear these arguments, I want to say a lot of things but mostly I want to tell my story.  But I don’t.  Because it’s painful and personal and I’ve spent a lot of years trying to get over the way it made me feel about myself. 

But it’s time.  My hands are shaking as I write, and I know that I’ll hesitate before hitting “publish”.  If my story helps convince even one parent to vaccinate their child, however, it will be worth it*.

———–

When I was twelve, I was raped by a friend’s older brother. 

It was on a cool, crisp winter day during Christmas break.  A day that started out like any other for a girl in that wonderful stage between playing with dolls and wearing make-up.

The end of the day showed a different person, one who didn’t feel she had any choice but to go on with life and pretend she hadn’t been raped by an 18 year old man while her friend laughed from the top bunk. 

In my 12-year-old mind, I couldn’t tell my parents because they would never look at me the same way again, would stop loving me, or find some way to blame me for what happened.  In short, everything would change.  I wanted to hold on to the hope that despite what happened, I would still be the same young girl I was when I woke up that morning.

My parents knew something was wrong – but I wouldn’t talk to them.  They sent me to see a psychologist who, for lack of any concrete information, determined that I had an unhealthy fascination with black people (and by the way, you spell quack Q-U-A-C-K). 

Over time I learned to wear the face of a normal person.  I also decided that it was better to give something away than to have it taken without permission.  During the ten years that followed, I made a lot of choices, both good and bad.  Each and every one of them was shaped in some way by what happened to me that day.

As a teenager, I finally told someone – my best friend Rachel, who continues to be one of the rocks I lean upon for support.  As time went by, I told a couple of boyfriends, my husband.  Eventually, my mom.

I’d like you, please, to imagine you are my mom for a moment.  Listening to her grown daughter tell her what she went through at the age of twelve.  What she continued to go through on her own, letting one incident that she had no control over shape who she became.  Imagine how my mom felt, wishing that somehow she could go back in time and make everything alright.  Understanding her daughter in a whole new way.  Wishing she could have been there to hold her daughter close and tell her that a mother’s love is forever.

Now imagine that, instead of sitting on the couch in my mother’s living room, we’re sitting together in a cold waiting room.  Holding hands and talking about the future.  I look to her and confess the secret I couldn’t tell her for fifteen years.  

A nurse calls my name, and my  mother leads me in to have my first round of chemo, because I’ve got cervical cancer.  Already, doctors have removed my cervix because, despite yearly pap smears, the cancer was already at stage 4 when they caught it.  I’ll never be able to have children, but hopefully I’ll survive. 

I don’t have cervical cancer.  I was lucky I didn’t contract HPV.  The man who raped me robbed me of so many things in life – fortunately, my health and my ability to have children weren’t one of them.  Please don’t leave your daughter’s future in the hands of luck, when you can take it by the horns with a simple vaccination. 

Sexual activity, at any age, is not always a battle of abstinence versus promiscuity.  Most rapes are committed by someone the victim knows.  The rapes of young girls are especially under-reported because they are children dealing with something most adults can’t handle.

Don’t be the mom holding her daughter’s hand in the waiting room, please.  Unless she’s twelve, and you’re waiting for her GARDASIL vaccination.


* I am all for a parent’s right to refuse vaccinations.  My own children have not been “fully vaccinated” according to standards because I exercised that right.  However, if the reasons for refusing the GARDASIL vaccination are purely because a parent believes a child will abstain from sexual activity, I disagree – heartily.