A young mum left unable to have any more children after battling cancer has urged other women to ensure they get smear tested.
Naomi Hougham, 29, had a radical hysterectomy and nearly died of sepsis after she was diagnosed with cervical cancer in September 2019.
The mum of one from Herne Bay, Kent, had put off going for her smear test after the birth of her son, Kyron, three.
But the mum says she could have saved herself years of trauma and the knowledge she would never fall pregnant again had she been screened earlier and caught the abnormal cells before they became cancerous.
Following giving birth, she said the smear test "was the last thing to be thinking about", but her partner encouraged her to go to the doctor.
She said: "As soon as I told them my symptoms, they screened me there and then and off the back of that I got a letter saying that they needed to see me.
"I didn't say anything for hours afterwards.
“Not for one second did I think that would be the outcome.
“It was like I was watching a soap opera. You think, ‘How’s that? I’m healthy, I’m a young woman’.”
To fight the cancer, Naomi opted for a hysterectomy to remove her uterus and cervix but left her ovaries to allow an option for egg-freezing and surrogacy.
But after the surgery, her condition took a drastic turn and she needed numerous blood transfusions, was admitted to intensive care with sepsis twice, and was then told cancer had spread to her lymph nodes.
The brave mum underwent a five-week course of chemoradiotherapy which "destroyed" her ovaries and is now completely infertile.
A new survey of 3,000 women commissioned by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) found embarrassment was the most common reason for not booking a screening appointment.
More than one in four women, (42%) who did not attend their smear listed this as the cause of their avoidance.
Naomi said: "I understand why people would be embarrassed but in the grand scheme of things would you rather be embarrassed for five minutes or go through what I went through?
"There will be girls out there who don't have children yet - I'm fortunate that I already had Kyron.
"Nowadays there are so many things that they can do to stop you from getting to the point that I got to, but only if you catch it soon enough.
"It's just five minutes and it can completely change your life."
The most recent figures from March 2021 show that nearly 30%t of eligible individuals aged between 25 and 64, were not screened.
In England, cervical screening is offered every three years on the NHS to people with a cervix between the ages of 24-and-a-half and 49.
For those between the ages of 50 and 64, screening is offered every five years.
Each year, around 2,700 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer and of those around 690 will die - this equates to two deaths every single day.
The figures were released as part of a major national campaign to increase the number of those eligible attending their cervical screening in England.
The campaign 'Help Us Help You - Cervical Screening Saves Lives', was launched by the NHS and the Department of Health and Social Care.
