00:00Hi I'm Pippa, I live in Leeds and I have vulva cancer. I use my other social media platforms
00:07to talk about this disease but decided I wanted to get out there even more using TikTok. So
00:12I'm going to start at what is a vulva. Men probably won't know what this is and scarily
00:18a lot of women don't know what this is. So basically it's your inner and outer lips of
00:23your vagina, your clitoris, the opening of your vagina and its glands, the opening of
00:28your urethra, so that's basically what you pee out of, your menis pubis, mons pubis even,
00:37which is the rounded area in front of the pubic bone, so this is the area that normally
00:40gets covered in hair after puberty. And like I say it's amazing how many women don't know
00:45what this is, even some women in the NHS don't know what this is. So I, throughout the latter
00:53half of 2022, was getting a lot of thrush infections. One ended up getting me into
01:01my GP because it was so bad, who took great care of me and who continue to do. And I developed
01:09a sore spot on the inside of my left lip, down there. This can be embarrassing to talk
01:17about but I really don't have any dignity where this is concerned anymore. And it just
01:23didn't seem to go away and over time I kept thinking this is maybe where the thrush is
01:27coming from. I was then diagnosed as diabetic which is why I was getting the thrush infections
01:34and was put on medication and the infections stopped but this soreness had turned into
01:39a lump which was getting quite sore. So on my first, one of my meetings with my diabetes
01:45nurse I mentioned it and she noticed I had an appointment with the doctor a couple of
01:49days later so extended it. Went to see the doctor, she took a little look at me and she
01:55looked at me through the big infections that I'd had and they normally say oh it could be
02:01this thing or it could be something else. I was told you've either got an infected cyst
02:06or you've got cancer. I knew very well it was cancer because the antibiotics that she gave
02:12me I'd had a few weeks previous for a chest infection but I thought no give it a go. Four
02:17or five days into taking the antibiotics I realised that they hadn't done anything so
02:23it was definitely the cancer. Went back to the doctors and they referred me to the hospital.
02:31That was on a Wednesday. The following Tuesday I was at the hospital which is the St James
02:36Hospital in Leeds. It's also the Yorkshire Cancer Centre which is incredible. Very lucky to have this
02:43like six miles away from my house and when I had biopsies they said there and then it looks like
02:50early stage indicative vulva cancer. I was like fine I'm not going to lie to you it was not a
02:55pleasant experience. The injections down there you have a lot of nerve endings it's a very sensitive
03:01area. Did the biopsies, said they'd be in touch. I then went to meet my consultant and by this
03:09point I already knew it was cancer. I'd been through some of the emotions, put my big girl
03:14pants on and was like let's just do this. Then I went to see the consultant which is Mr
03:22Nugent who is amazing. He's incredibly meticulous, very thorough and just a very very good guy.
03:31He said to me yep it's early stage cancer and what we'll need to do is remove, I think they
03:37removed about 70 to 80 percent of my left labia, so my left lip. I was put into surgery a few
03:44weeks later, well in fact a week and a half later so I had a lot of running around to get stuff
03:50organised. Had the surgery and then went on to try and recover. Now I'm going to do these videos in a
03:59bit of a series because it's going to take a while to get through everything, so I'm just
04:03going to talk about my first experience with everything in this video. So I had the surgery
04:11which was actually not too bad. I spent a week in hospital, so I came down with an infection,
04:18went through all the recovery. I had to have district nurses coming out because I had
04:22lymph nodes taken out, I had a drain in my stomach. Back in hospital a few times I say
04:27with infections, not sure if I've mentioned that already. I'm not used to doing videos so bear with
04:32me. Once I got through all of that, went back and got all my final results because what they do is
04:41they send all the tissue off to make sure they've got really good margins etc and obviously the
04:45lymph nodes as well. Unfortunately it was found in one of the lymph nodes, in fact it was in two
04:51but it was encapsulated within those two so it had not spread further from those. So it was decided I
04:56would need treatment. So long story short, ended up having 25 radiotherapy sessions with five chemo.
05:06So the radiotherapy was every day Monday to Friday and the chemo was every Wednesday and then
05:15was told that I would be on three month check-ups which would just be a physical examination
05:20for two years and then on to six months for the remainder of my life because
05:25vulva cancer is actually quite a rare cancer, it only affects 1 in 300 women in the UK.
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