I work one day a week at our county’s public health department. There I met Sue, a 31-year-old woman who came in with pelvic pain and bleeding. She proved to have extremely aggressive cervical cancer that was stage IV when I diagnosed it. When Sue was 18, she had a tubal ligation after she gave birth to her only child. As a single mom, she did not have the financial resources to have more children. She concentrated on raising her daughter. Sue always worked, sometimes two jobs at once, but never the kind of job that offered health insurance. Because she’d had a tubal ligation, she did not qualify for our state’s Family Planning Expansion Project that provides free annual exams, Pap smears, and contraceptive services to many of our clients. Cervical cancer is an almost entirely preventable disease. Pap smears almost always find it in its pre-invasive form, but Sue never came in for a Pap smear or an annual exam. Her lack of affordable access to basic health care proved fatal. When Sue died of cervical cancer, her daughter was 13.