Hi, this is Dr. ___’s office, calling about the results of your recent pap smear.Uh oh, that’s not good. When it comes to medical tests, typically, no news is good news — and I’d received normal results on paps since I started getting them in college. Okay, let’s hear it.It came back abnormal. The results were atypical squamous cells of undetermined significance with exposure to HPV.Um, come again? What the hell does that mean? Atypical sounds bad! When it comes to my vagina, I definitely want to be typical.Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean you have cervical cancer. I haven’t seen cervical cancer in my office for 30 years.Good news, I guess?Okay, so make an appointment for a colposcopy in a week. Record scratch/freeze frame/so, you’re probably wondering how I ended up here . Kidding, but that’s about where my mind was at this moment two years ago — how could I, a married 31-year-old woman who’d been monogamous for nearly six years, have HPV? And need a colposcopy, which thanks to Dr. Google, I learned was a super-fun procedure where your gyno biopsies tissue from your cervix to see if it’s cancerous, and sends you home wearing a giant menstrual pad? It felt like my body had betrayed me.Thankfully, it turned out my own cells were not precancerous, and I was given instructions to avoid smoking, take vitamins, and get another pap in six months to see if my body fought off the HPV. But I was still baffled about how I ended up with HPV (human papillomavirus) in the first place. Of course, I know being in your 30s and monogamous doesn’t necessarily safeguard you from sexually transmitted infections (STIs), but I really didn’t expect to be told I had one — even HPV. I thought I’d escaped my 20s in the clear.But in reality, I’m far from unique. There’s a running joke (if you can call it that) that "everyone has HPV." The real numbers aren’t quite that dramatic, but it’s still hugely common: In fact, 80 million (one in four) people in the U.S. are infected, according to the CDC. That’s why experts push vaccination so hard. The CDC recommends that all girls and boys get vaccinated at age 11 or 12, to get protection against the HPV types that are most likely to cause cervical cancer. But I was in college when the vaccine was just gaining steam. I didn’t know that much about it. The vaccine requires three doses, but I got one and never went back for the others. Too bad, too, because there’s evidence that even two shots may be just as good as three.The lesson is a retroactive schooling in STIs and sexual health — one that I learned way too late as a married lady. A few years back, I interviewed a well-known Ob/Gyn for a story I was writing, and she told me that when she tells married women that they have HPV, she also tells them not to go home and hit their spouses over the head with a pan for cheating on them. That’s because you could have been exposed to the virus long ago, and it can lay dormant in your system for years , emerging just as you’re experiencing something that’s weighing your immune function down, like stress.