The quick simplicity
of a LEEP belies its role in
medicine’s triumph over a
deadly disease. In the 1950s,
cervical cancer was a leading
cause of cancer deaths for Ameri-
can women (it still kills more
than 260,000 people a year in
developing countries). Now, it’s
almost completely preventable,
says Linda Nicoll, MD, a gyno at
NYU Langone Health.
This is largely because of bet-
ter screening techniques and the
HPV vaccine, which protects
against the riskiest strains of the
STI that causes most cervical
cancers. But treatments like
LEEP also played a role. The pro-
cedure, first performed in the
U.S. in 1990, is like a second line
of de fe n s e , e xc i s i n g c e l l s t h a t
may otherwise lead to cancer. It’s
fast—a doctor slices into the cer-
vix and scoops out sketchy tis-
sue, the same way you might cut
a bruise out of an apple—and it
usually works.
It’s also super common. Up to
one million women in the U.S.
are diagnosed every
year with abnormal cer-
vical cells, or what MDs
call cervical dysplasia.
Not all cases are high
risk, but if doctors feel
the precancerous spots
need to be removed,
LEEP is the most popular treat-
ment. No one knows exactly how
many are performed, since
they’re considered as minor as,
say, having a skin tag cut off, says
Noah Goldman, MD, a gyneco-Then it was August 2010. Her
gyno was brusque, businesslike.
Sasha* entered the room with
cold fluorescent lights and put
her feet in the stirrups. She was a
little nervous, but the doctor had
said that a loop electrosurgical
e xc i s ion a l pr o c e du r e , or L E E P,
would rid her cervix of the irreg-
ular cells that had been detected
by her recent Pap smear and
some follow-up tests. Thanks to a
shot of anesthesia, Sasha felt
nothing as a small heated wire
was inserted into her vagina. The
whole thing was over in minutes.
Walking home afterward, she
had a hazy premonition that
something was wrong, but she
brushed it off—even when, for
days, it almost felt like there was
a part missing inside her body, a
kind of hole where something
important used to be.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later
that a nice-looking guy
approached Sasha at a bar. On
their third date, she brought him
b a ck t o he r pl a c e. T he y we r e
making out, entangled on her
bed, when she tilted her hips into
him—and nothing happened.
Confused, Sasha tried again,
crunching her body against his,
searching for the tingle that had
often signaled the early sensa-
tions of orgasm. Instead, “I felt
nothing,” she recalls. She contin-
ued going through the motions,
but her mind was elsewhere,
working itself into a panic over
the numbness in her pelvis.
After the guy left, she reached
down to touch herself like she
had roughly once a day since she
was 8 or 9 years old. But the soft,
once-sensitive spot between her
labia felt numb and dry. “You
know that game where you putcoins in the slot and a claw
comes down to try and grab a
teddy bear, but it can never grasp
it?” Sasha asks. “That’s how it
felt. There was a sort of sensation
in my clitoral area, but just as I
was about to orgasm, it was
suddenly nothing.”
“I knew then,” she says. “Holy
shit, they broke me.”“There was a sort of sensation
in my clitoral area, but just
as I was about to orgasm, itwas suddenly nothing.”
When she tries to remember
the feeling, she thinks of Drew*, a grad student with
golden hair she dated in her mid-20s. Drew liked
to touch the spot where her legs met her butt—and
she loved to let him. She was so hypersexual that
sometimes just tilting her hips into him, even fully
clothed, could trigger that intense pulse-pulse-pulse
d e e p insid e he r. That wild f lur r y of c o nt ra c tio ns
that felt like every cell in her body was lighting up
and regenerating. It felt, she thought, like magic.
*Name has been changed.
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Cosmopolitan October 2019