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Once Christine Baze reached her 20s, she dutifully reported for an annual gynecological exam and a Pap smear. And ever year, she was given a clean bill of health. So in April 2000, when Baze's Pap smear indicated some abnormal cell growth in her cervix, she wasn't too concerned. "I was a very healthy person," she says.
In fact, Baze had rarely felt better. Then 31, she had quit her job as a professional therapist just a few months earlier to focus full-time on her music career in Boston, where her band was getting a lot of gigs. Baze's gynecologist assured her that cancer was unlikely but ordered a more advanced exam, a colposcopy, to be sure.
But on the scheduled day of Baze's follow-up visit, she got an early-morning phone call confirming an afternoon appointment with a doctor she'd never heard of. "Where are you calling from?" she asked. The new doctor, it turns out, was a gynecological oncologist--a cancer specialist. The receptionist had inadvertently called Baze before her own doctor had had the chance to break the news.
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Baze hung up and looked at her husband. "I have cancer," she told him, not yet quite believing it herself. Then she began to sob.
Not only did she have cervical cancer, the test indicated extensive lymphatic invasion. Ten days later, Baze had a radical hysterectomy followed by more surgery and daily radiation, plus weekly chemotherapy treatments. Already slim, the five-foot-nine redhead became skeletal--dropping from 128 to 106 pounds. She barely had enough energy to get out of bed. Everything she ate or drank "tasted bad" and often made her vomit. Some nights, her temperature climbed to 104 degrees.
"I couldn't do anything," Baze recalls. "I lost my band, my music. I didn't feel like me." After suffering through weeks of treatments, she says, "I started to question: 'Am I doing this for a reason?' Now I know the reason I stuck with it."
Baze won the battle against her cervical cancer, but at great physical and emotional cost. Now she's trying to spread awareness about the disease through her music and a new nonprofit organization she founded: Popsmear.org, which raises funds for cervical cancer research. "Every woman needs to understand that they don't need to go through what I did--or, worse, to die from this," says Baze.
Had she taken a test for the human papillomavirus (HPV)--a leading cause of cervical cancer--along with her Pap smear, her cancer might have been detected earlier, perhaps avoiding the chemotherapy and the hysterectomy. "When I found out that cervical cancer is preventable, I got mad," she says. "Then I thought, I'm an intelligent, proactive, responsible woman and I didn't know about this test. How many other women don't know about it?"
Human papillomaviruses are among the most common sexually transmitted infections (as many as one in five sexually-active Americans are estimated to be infected at any time). Often the immune system can suppress the virus or get rid of it completely. But lingering infections may turn into cancer. HPVs are now considered the major cause of cervical cancer, and studies suggest that strains of the virus may also play a role in vaginal, throat and other cancers, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS).
But the test that detects HPV in the cervix was not an option for Baze. It was only approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the spring of 2000--about the same time that Baze discovered she had the cancer--and then only for testing women with abnormal Pap results. But in March 2003, the FDA decided to approve its use as a screening tool, too, in conjunction with the Pap test, for all women over the age of 30.
The same year, Baze spread the word about the test when she played in six cities around the country in "The Yellow Umbrella Tour" with her new band, The Skills of Ortega. It raised nearly $10,000 for Popsmear.org. (The tour got its name from a scene in the movie "Harold and Maude" in which Maude, a vivacious septuagenarian, stands out from a crowd of black-clad funeralgoers with her bright, yellow umbrella. To Baze, it symbolized life in the face of death.)
Baze decided to launch the tour after she and some local bands played a benefit concert in Boston that raised about $10,000 for some of the cancer organizations that she had turned to in 2000, like the Gynecologic Cancer Foundation (www.thegcf.org) and the National Cervical Cancer Coalition (www.nccc-online.org).
This month, Baze continues to tout the test during the second Yellow Umbrella Tour, which also includes the band K's Choice from Belgium and is visiting 22 cities across the country. It may be the only concert to include a lecture on going to the gynecologist, a slide show on HPV testing and a six-and-a-half-minute film on cervical cancer. But the serious subject matter has hardly deterred fans. This week's show in New York City sold out. And it seems that in every audience, there are cancer survivors, many of whom approach Baze after the show. Other fans just thank her for spreading the word about HPV tests. One man held up his palm, where he'd written "HPV" as a reminder to ask his girlfriend to get the test. "It's an awareness campaign," Baze says. "If even one person out of 100 there goes to the doctor who hadn't planned to, and gets the test, then it's worth it."
The ACS estimates that more than 10,500 cases of invasive cervical cancer will be diagnosed in the United States this year, and 3,900 women will die from it. Of course, those numbers have decreased significantly over the past 50 years, after the Pap smear exam went into widespread use in the 1940s and 1950s. The ACS says the number of deaths from the cancer fell by nearly 75 percent between 1955 and 1992. Baze hopes to see those numbers drop even more, with increased popularity of the HPV test.
"I want to do the Yellow Umbrella Tour and keep Popsmear.org going until we eliminate this cancer--I totally believe that it will happen in my lifetime," she says. "And I want to be a part of it."
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