cancer slayer

Jump to Comments

Since last month, Tamika Felder has been putting in a lot of overtime hours. The 34-year-old TV producer and on-air talent spends her days prepping guests, handling contracts and overseeing shoots, but after hours is when she begins the job she most passionate about — cervical cancer advocate.

Felder, founder of the advocacy organization Tamika & Friends, has been working nonstop since the start of 2010 to raise awareness about cervical cancer.

Her main messages: cervical cancer is preventable and it is not a result of promiscuous sexual behavior.

When Felder was diagnosed nine years ago, there was little information about cervical cancer and even fewer resources. She’s been on a mission to change that ever since, sharing information about necessary screenings and preventive practices.

That involves two tests that have proven highly effective in combating the disease: the Pap test, which checks for changes in the cells of the cervix before cancer develops, and the HPV test, which is used to detect the presence of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, the sexually transmitted virus that is the primary cause of cervical cancer.

There are more than 100 types of HPV, and 30 or so are spread through sexual contact, including oral sex. It’s so common that nearly all sexually active adults will become infected with some form of the virus during their lives, but most will never know it because it usually clears up on its own.

“We are all exposed to HPV at some point,” says Felder. “Some of us just don’t have the immune systems to fight it off.”

Within the last 30 years alone, the number of cervical cancer deaths has declined by 74 percent due to increased use of the Pap test. And in recent years, the vaccine Gardasil has proven successful in preventing HPV in young women who have not been exposed to the virus, although it has seen it’s fair share of controversy since hitting the market, mostly because of reported adverse side effects.

Yet, despite the advances, about 11,000 women will be diagnosed with the disease this year, and about 4,000 will die. Early screening and detection is crucial, particularly for sexually active women between the ages of 20-24, the population most likely to be infected. The American Cancer society recommends that women begin regular cervical cancer screenings about three years after they become sexually active.

“Most women with cervical cancer don’t show symptoms,” says Dr. Beverly London, a GYN in Jacksonville, Fla. “Some have bleeding after sex or a bloody or watery discharge, but it’s a pretty asymptomatic disease. It’s a slow-growing disease that is highly treatable when a woman gets a Pap test regularly.”

That’s information that Felder passes along to the thousands of women she meets as part of her cervical cancer campaign. It’s also information she wishes she’d been armed with when she was in her twenties.

Felder, who had no symptoms, originally scheduled an appointment to see her doctor for a boil under her arm. While she was there, the doctor recommended that she have a Pap test. It had been years since she’d gotten one, she admits, “for two reasons: I didn’t have insurance, and I had body-image issues.”

Two weeks later, when the results of her test came back, Felder was told she had advanced cervical cancer. Not long after her diagnosis, she underwent a radical hysterectomy to remove the tumors, followed by eight rounds of chemo and 16 rounds of radiation treatment.

“I thought I’d leave the appointment with the doctor telling me I needed to lose weight, not that I had cancer,” she says.

Scared and in shock, Felder says she remembered another friend, Catherine Tyler, who had a similar story.

Tyler, a marketing manger for AT&T, had been diagnosed in 1994, at the age of 25. At the time, she was a senior in college, was in a monogamous relationship, and she’d just been accepted to grad school. When she went to see her doctor after suffering pelvic pain and irregular periods for several months, she thought she might be pregnant. Like Felder, it had been years since she had seen a GYN and had a Pap test, but she considered herself pretty healthy.

“My mother wouldn’t take me to the doctor for a Pap or for birth control pills, only because she was old-school,” says Tyler. “She felt that if I wasn’t having sex, then I didn’t need a Pap smear because it was invasive. And if I was having sex, she wasn’t going to get me birth control pills because she saw it as a license to have sex.”

Tyler was in fact pregnant with her daughter, Sydney, who is now 16, but she was also diagnosed with cervical cancer.

After seeing a family oncologist, she had a partial hysterectomy and immediately started chemo and then radiation. It was a difficult regimen, she says, but she was determined not to put her life’s plans on hold. After giving birth, she attended grad school, baby in tow, and continued her treatments while she studied. She also began talking to young women about the disease, including her daughter.

“I think about girls like me, girls whose parents never talked to them about sex and yearly exams,” Tyler concludes. “I didn’t know any better. I tell my daughter and the other girls I talk to that anyone can get HPV. I wasn’t having sex in high school, and I don’t want them to think this disease comes from being promiscuous. There’s no education around it, which means there will be more cases. There are too many 21- and 22-year-olds with the virus. More education will lead to lower numbers. We’ve got to get the word out.”

For more information on cervical cancer, go to TamikaandFriends.org.