A YOUNG mother whose life was saved by the early detection of cancer is urging women not to skip their smear tests.

Julie Walker, 32, decided to speak out during Cervical Cancer Prevention Week, after it was revealed a third of young women in Oxfordshire turned down routine screening last year.

Mrs Walker, of Tamar Way, Didcot, had just celebrated her tenth wedding anniversary in the summer of 2008 with husband George, 38, and their son Cameron’s first birthday.

But her world collapsed when a routine smear showed abnormalities.

She said: “I hadn't really thought much about it until I got a phone call from the GP asking me to come back.

“They said it was probably nothing to worry about, but at that point I had some instinct it was not going to be good.”

Three days later she was having further tests at John Radcliffe Hospital. A biopsy was sent to a laboratory, and a week later came the news Mrs Walker had been dreading.

She said: “The first thing you think when you hear that word ‘cancer’ is that you’pre going to die. I just went numb.”

Surgeons performed two 20-minute operations, and Mrs Walker faced an agonising six-week-long wait for the results.

Her diagnosis came just a week before Jade Goody learnt she had cervical cancer on live TV, prompting months of coverage of her illness and eventual death.

Mrs Walker said: “It was very hard. You wake up every morning and it is the first thing you think about. All I could think about is what would happen to Cameron if something happened to me.

“I got to the point where I did not want to look at the TV because of all the stories about Jade Goody.”

Finally, the results came back all clear. She still returns for smear tests every six months, and has now used this week’s national awareness event to urge all women to go for their routine check-ups.

She said: “Of course you are in an embarassing position and it can be a bit uncomfortable, but it is worth going through five minutes of discomfort if it saves your life.

“At the stage my cancer was picked up, there is a 97 per cent survival rate. If I had not gone, it would be a very bleak outlook.”

In most cases, cervical cancer is slow-growing, taking between 10 and 15 years for abnormal cells to become cancerous.

It can be detected by examining cells taken from the cervix in a smear test. There are nearly 3,000 new cases in the UK each year, and about 1,000 deaths – six per cent of women under 35.

Cervical screening saves 4,500 women’s lives each year.