Hi. My name's Karen. I am 19 years old and I suffer from the human papillomavirus which is also known as HPV. I contracted it when I was having unprotected sex with my boyfriend for the past year and a half. I never heard of HPV before and when I went to the gynecologist, I went originally on a yeast infection, but they did a pap smear and I was told I contracted HPV. When they found out the strand, they let me know it was okay, but the thing about HPV, there's no treatment. You would have to wait about a year or half a year in order for it to go away. It was heartbreaking. I cried for about a week. I didn't know what it was and the fact that there was no treatment got me even more scared. HPV actually leads to cervical cancer, which is even more serious of a problem in women because a lot of women don't know they have HPV because they don't go get checked out. They have a lot of unprotected sex and they think that birth control protects them from anything and they don't realize that birth control only protects them from pregnancy, not from STDs or any of that stuff. Now I am currently HPV free, but I had to take steps to get that way. HPV has no signs so I suggest for women to go get checked out by a gynecologist once a year. It's recommended always to get checked out once a year. Make sure to have protected sex, even if it's your boyfriend, even if it's like someone you truly care about. To have unprotected sex is not fair that you are giving something to someone and they're spreading it around. So I think just suggest to be very careful, have protected sex definitely.