Recurrent Vulvovaginal Thrush

I think the... the difference is how it impacts your life really, isn't it? Because I... if I had it once or twice in my life, yeah, it would be uncomfortable, but the fact that when you get it recurrently, when you get it every month, it doesn't give your body time to recover from the last bout before you get the next. So, the itching stays, you have the split skin, it’s just... it’s a completely different condition in my eyes, I think you should... they should almost be treated completely separately and not related. Because thrush is bad on its own, but how... when you have it like so consistently, it’s just... it’s another kettle of fish, it’s not... it’s just horrendous, it’s a completely different thing.

I guess the realisation that like it was a recurring thing was I remember when I first got it, when I was a teenager, and reading like the NHS webpage about thrush and reading this sentence at the bottom and it was like: “Some people experience recurring thrush,” and thinking like, ‘oh man, it must be awful to be that kind of person, because this is really horrible,’ [laughs] and then I was like, ‘oh, this is me a few years later,’ and I was bit like... I guess I’m quite an optimistic person and I just thought, ‘they’ll be some way of sorting this out, like there’ll be a treatment, there’ll be something that we can do.’

I think I just read about it on the NHS website on the... just like the... the page about thrush, there’s like a very small section about recurring thrush and if you experience it more than this many times a year, and then I sort of did a bit more, very surface-level research online about recurring thrush and realised that it was a thing that people get, but yeah, not more than that. And then I probably went to the doctor and said, “I think I’ve got recurring thrush,” so I can’t really remember whether they would have then sort of labelled it in that way.

Yeah, there’s a leaflet in there that says... in the box, that says... I think there’s something on the cream as well that says if there’s no improvement within a certain amount of days, go and see a doctor, and I think there’s something in the actual leaflet itself that... that says if you have so many episodes in a period you should go and see the doctor.

I also find that interesting from doing this, because even though they treated me... they’ve given me, what, I think in the last... less in the last 12 months, I definitely can remember they’ve given me three different on three different occasions, prescriptions for thrush, but they’ve never really framed it in a re-occurrent wording, even though I probably... I have gone back many times and even though I go for years and like had thrush medication, but no, that’s not ever been picked up as like a re-occurrent thing. It was only really so I saw your study and it was re-occurrent thrush and was like, ‘oh well, that’s me because I get it all the time.’

There was... they never gave me like an official diagnosis but they would say like, ‘OK, so we've you know looked at your swabs and there’s... you know there’s... there’s... the sample’s come back with... you know, that you've got thrush, so you know we're going to give you this,’ and there was never... it was never sort of a... and never like a label or diagnosis where they said, ‘oh, you've got recurring thrush, this is... you know, this is how we deal with that,’ it was more like, ‘we can see you've got a history of having repeated episodes of thrush,’ and each instance was kind of... although they were able to say that, it was all kind of dealt with as like isolated episodes rather than looking at the bigger picture. Because I was like half-expecting them to put me on sort of some medication like... to take for a while, but they never did, it always like, ‘we're going to look at this as like a sort of isolated incident,’ even though they... even though that they knew that I had had... obviously had of sort of these episodes, repeated episodes for years.

But I would say it’s the constant going back and forth to a doctor where they only give you a week’s worth of treatment and they don't sort of consider all the other episodes you've had throughout your life and there’s no sort of, ‘well, why are you getting it so often?’ but I don't think anyone’s ever asked me like, ‘well, this is maybe the fifth or sixth time you've had it in 12 months, why is that, maybe is there something else going on?’

And these are so routine things, like a doctor should be able to say like, oh OK, we're clearly looking at the amount of times that I've been given the medicine or prescribed or the... the appointment notes and things, but they just don't bother, and I think that’s really sad. Then also it’s not even like I've been to the same GP every single time, I've been to probably a collective of maybe 10 different doctors and none of them have ever considered to say, ‘well actually, maybe we need to do a bit more of a full sweep on you to see why you're still getting it and why it’s been so... so sort of like regular,’ I guess as well.

It was really frustrating, and obviously it’s like uncomfortable and not nice, it’s not a nice experience, so it’s kind of... and also, it’s like a little bit of an embarrassing thing to have to go to the GP and talk about and so, yeah, it was... I guess it was just kind of frustrating, and then when I’d realised like, ‘OK, I don’t think this... this is just like a one-off, you know, every now and then,’ it was then kind of I felt like the... the treatment that I was offered didn’t reflect that, that it was kind of ongoing.

So, it actually wasn’t really explained to me very well, and I think that’s perhaps because I... well, I would have... I went in saying like, “I think I have thrush,” and then they did a swab and then were like, “Yeah, you have thrush, here’s fluconazole,” and then I had some more sort of... then I had some telephone appointments, and they were like, “oh yeah, it sounds like you have thrush again,” and that was the... the same experience was just kind of treating as like a discrete one-off thing, until the last appointment where I had... I got given the... like six months worth... six months’ worth.

The first few... the GP, she was a bit... she was a bit dismissive I think because I wasn't going with active symptoms, because I'd treated them myself, which is what you're supposed to do and I said, “I've had it for the past three months,” or the past four months at this point, I said, “I can't keep doing this,” and she was like, “Are you sure it’s that because you haven't got any symptoms?” and I was like, “I haven't got any symptoms because I've treated it, but yes I'm absolutely dead-certain it’s this, and like there’s no denying that it’s this because it’s... ticks every box of the criteria and it goes away when I take the pills.”

I think she just didn’t seem to believe me, because she was just like, “Oh, it... you've got a bit of redness but it looks fine, oh, it’s a bit irritated but it looks all right. And like I've been with this doctor for years, I know her very well, but I think she thinks sometimes that we exaggerate things, and I was like, “I'm really not exaggerating this problem,” and then like I said when I did see and I had it active, she was like, “Oh my God, this is...” so I think... and she did say to me, I don't know if she says this to everyone, but she was like, “This is actually the worst case of thrush I've ever seen in my life and you are... it’s horrendous, and you need to get this sorted.”

Because the problem is getting to your GP to get a swab, even prior to the pandemic, it was really challenging: post-pandemic even more so, and by the time that appointment comes through, particularly if you’re working full-time, you’re so symptomatic that the... you just think, ‘yes, I know that having this recorded on a system would be hugely beneficial because they can actually record how many episodes I’ve had,’ But it just... the symptoms to me become too intolerable to manage it that way, so I chose to self-manage.

It was six to nine months and then I felt like I was getting somewhere with them like to... you know, they were like, “OK, recurrent thrush,” and they gave... they gave me the swabs, and then I fell pregnant, so I didn't get any symptoms you know for those nine, 10, 11, 12 months until I got my period again, and then I went through it and I was like, ‘this is not something that I cured,’ and I went, and I was really like, “I... I... I am getting recurrent thrush, I've had it before,” and luckily I had a female GP that answered and she... I said, “You need to look at my old records how many times I'd been, look at my swabs, this is it,” and then I had to do more swabs again to get them to diagnose me as recurrent thrush, they wouldn't do... because I had to do the whole thing again and I had to wait I think a few months I think it was, they I needed a certain number of swabs or it had to be a... I... I don't know, they had some... a number of episodes that I had to have or a number of swabs that I had to have.

It was really difficult to even get an appointment because they kept saying, you can go to the pharmacy, go to the pharmacy and get your... and get your Canesten basically, get that, get that, and I was like I've had... I've spent a lot of money on... I have been. And, so yeah, it was getting... getting an appointment was quite difficult, but once I did, the GPs were sort of understanding but I had to have a real conversation with them and I could only do that when I was lucky enough to get through to a female GP, and they were quite reassuring, but it’s always a different one so I couldn't follow my case up with one person, then I felt like I had to go through it all again with the next one and explain my full situation and it... you know, trying to get on track and like you'll go, you know, “I have got recurrent thrush,” and then it’s like, oh yeah, we've got to swab again and it’s... I had to go through it all again with the next new one, does that make sense?

When I was like 26, 27: they did a load of samples, then the next time I went back they’d lost all my samples, then they did all the samples again, then I didn’t hear from them for like three months, I moved house and then they were like, “You’re no longer in the catchment area,” [chuckles] and I was like, “Please, fix my vagina.”

And did they ever give you a label of like recurrent thrush or explain the recurrence, or how was that dealt with?

The referral to the specialist when I was 26, 27, came because a doctor went, “You’ve had this for seven years,” and I was like, “Correct,” and he was like, “That’s not normal,” and I was like, “Yeah, it doesn’t feel normal,” and he was like, “Let’s send you somewhere to figure out what’s going on.” Before then, no, they just treated it each time... each time I went to the doctor they were like, “Oh, you’ve got thrush now, here’s the medication for thrush.”

I did like a WedMD of it or something and I worked out that it was thrush probably, and then I started taking the medication and it went away, so I was like, ‘oh, that was probably it, I don't have to think about this again.’ And then I went to uni and I got it I would say every two months for about a year and a half, which was not great.

But I had had quite a few experiences where I've been told that you can’t have recurrent thrush, where you can’t have like thrush on like kind of coming quite... quite a bit, so I was like... often like doubted myself; I doubted that I actually have thrush. I remember when I was about 18, going to the doctor and being like something’s wrong and I had like... it was like enormous rash everywhere, and she was like, ‘yes, this is the worst case of thrush I've ever seen,’ and I was like, ‘oh, I... I was like told that what I was experiencing wasn't thrush.’

To be honest, I’ve only ever had swabs about three times, which has surprised me, because there is another thing that... that’s very similar to thrush, and I don't know what other ill... do you know what illness it is? It’s some... it’s something... another issue that women can have but it’s not thrush, but actually it’s quite... you have to have it checked very often because it can turn into something bad, do you know what I mean? And I can’t remember what it’s called now, but... so... but they never tested me for that for years, but I don’t think they have ever tested me because I... I think if they’d... if they send it off to the lab and it’s thrush – they know it’s thrush, but if it wasn’t thrush and I was getting similar thrush systems it could... symptoms, then it could be something else, I can’t remember what it was called, but I... like I said, I’ve read this on the internet.