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MONDAY, Jan. 12 (HealthDayNews) -- It was an annual check-up just like any other check-up, or so Kim Villanueva thought.

The only difference, she assumed, was that it was August 1996 and she was six weeks pregnant with her second child.

But Villanueva's Pap smear came back abnormal. In January, her doctors performed a colposcopy, a way of examining the cervix and surrounding tissue. Again, the results were abnormal.

"I think at that point, I knew deep down that it was more serious than what everybody was saying," says Villanueva, a controller for a party rental company in Maryland and a volunteer for the American Cancer Society. "My family was saying it's no big deal, don't stress about it."

Villanueva's doctors felt a biopsy was called for but they had to wait until her baby was born in late May. Ten weeks after the birth of her son, a biopsy turned up cancer with glandular involvement. Even then, Villanueva did not quite believe it.

She was sitting in her doctor's office at the end of the day after everyone else had gone. When he said "cancer," she recalled, she replied, "Are you sure it's not just a severe infection?" The doctor turned the report around on his desk and showed her where it said "cancer" in black-and-white on the form.

Doctors at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore performed a cone biopsy and were hoping to excise all the cancer cells that way, but they found tumors in the lymphatic channel. That meant Villanueva needed a hysterectomy and had to have her pelvic and aortic lymph nodes removed to make sure the cancer hadn't spread.

Here's when Villanueva's luck started to change: The cancer had not hit the lymph nodes so she did not have to endure chemotherapy. "I was clean as of the surgery," she says. That was September 1997. Villanueva was 27 years old.

The mystery is how the cancer managed to develop and progress when Villanueva reported religiously for her annual Pap smears. "I think part of the reason was because the Pap smears that were being done at the time were so hard to read that it might have been a false-negative," she says. "That's my own suspicion, but I don't know if that's the case."

Villanueva still goes for screening every year, an event that causes her no small amount of distress.

"When you first start going for those, there's so much anxiety associated with it that it's like a huge bookcase in the middle of the room and you can't get by it," she says. "I get very irritable with my family for the two to three weeks it takes to get the results back. I would always call the doctor and not wait for him to mail me something."

The process is a little easier each year. And this year marks the sixth year she's been cancer-free.

"It's just a regular check-up," she says. "Just like you go for your mammograms, you go for this too."

(SOURCE: Kim Villanueva, Maryland )

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