Health// So, Your Sex Is On Fire: A No-Nonsense Guide To Bartholin’s Cysts

By Chloe De Lullington
17 January 2021

It’s remarkable just how much I don’t know about my own body. (Sorry in advance to my mother, who doubtless never dreamed of her daughter talking in graphic detail about her vagina on the internet, but here we find ourselves.) Last week, I found out about my Bartholin’s glands via Bartholin’s cysts – aka, the hard way. Over four days, I went from being my usual levels of stressed (skin breakouts, my new kittens suddenly needing the vet, the general state of the world being both diseased and on fire) to a new and altogether more painful form of stressed. It started as a minor tender sensation when I wiped after using the loo, but by day four I could barely sit comfortably; my left labia had swollen up to practically twice its usual size and that thing was BURNING.

It might be that you’re more well-educated on That Side Of Things, but humour me while I share what I learned. 

Turns out, if you’re AFAB, you’ve got tiny little glands at the entrance to the vagina. They’re responsible for lubrication (which is doubtless why we’re not taught about them, because who cares about female sexual gratification, amirite?) and sometimes they can get blocked, or clogged up. This is where the cyst forms; it’s basically just a fluid-filled lump, and for the most part it’s painless – apparently lots of people don’t know they have them. If they get larger, they can cause discomfort when sitting or walking, and if they get infected, that’s when shit really gets painful. 

This is called a Bartholin’s abscess, and it’s when the cyst fills up with pus. Pus-y pussy, anyone? If you Google “Bartholin abscess” (after having no doubt Googled, like me, all your specific complaints in a state of sweaty panic while sitting on the toilet) one of the top results lists the symptoms of this as, and I wish I was joking, “pain”. That’s it. For something in such an intimate area – and, as I later learned, so relatively common among people with vaginas (1 in 50 of us will get them at some point, and they’re most common age 20-29) – you’d expect there to be a little more detail, nuance, maybe some scientific reassurance. 

Further digging led me to a handful of blogs, forums, and the sparse smattering of medical sites that actually covered the issue. The advice from these various places all sounded equally vague: they all recommended, in the first instance, something called a Sitz Bath. Sounds like a bad country bumpkin joke, doesn’t it? You know, “what does I do when my fanny’s on fire? I Sitz in the bath” – but it seemed to be the only actual advice out there, with the next recommendation being the significantly more alarming “visit your doctor and have the abscess surgically drained, after which you will need to be fitted with a catheter for a number of weeks”. I wasn’t about to volunteer for that, so I went to Sitz myself down in the bath.

All joking aside (because there is a chance this might actually help someone else out there), Sitz Baths are fine, and the most basic thing in the world. You make sure your bathtub is clean, you fill it with a few inches of warm to hot water, and you sit in it for fifteen minutes at a time, ideally repeating this three or four times a day. Now, I love an excuse to take a hot bath as much as the next gal, because #selfcare, but I appreciate it’s not the most practical advice – especially as lots of young people don’t have a bath in their home (thanks, London property market). The good news is, you can buy Sitz Bath kits which fit over the top of your toilet seat so you can dip your bits in the water without committing to the full bathing experience. Additionally, there is some evidence that topically applying gauze soaked in a tea tree and castor oil solution can help, as can applying diluted apple cider vinegar, although, full disclosure, I didn’t try this.

Fortunately for me, a couple of days of baths did the trick. It helps by soothing the pain and encouraging small abscesses to rupture and drain (don’t try and pop the thing yourself), so I can only assume mine was small, despite the pulsing, puffy, swollen evidence to the contrary. With my nether regions returning to blissful normalcy, I confided in a friend about the whole pussy palava, and to my surprise, she said she’d had the exact same thing herself and only knew how to treat it because, by pure chance, she followed a sex positive, body positive, health positive influencer type on Instagram. This actually made me angry. I’m lucky to have an incredibly open and frank relationship with the friend in question – it’s a warts and all, no taboos kind of bond (although in this case, “cysts and all” might be more appropriate) – but to think she’d had to stumble through the same uncomfortable, scary experience as me with no proper advice and no idea where to turn to find such advice – well, it hit me quite hard.

So in short, if this article happens to help one person know how to care for their feminine health and deal with the sudden, painful onset of Bartholin’s cysts and Bartholin’s abscesses, I will consider all my own personal burning discomfort worth it (and no, I’m not talking about embarrassment). Whoever Bartholin was, he - and it definitely was a he - clearly did a pretty shoddy job in normalising talking about his big discovery, so it’s left to me to spread the word. Bartholin’s cysts and Bartholin’s abscesses are normal, commonplace, treatable, and absolutely not something with which you should have to suffer in silence. 

And to paraphrase a lyric from unwashed rockers the Kings of Leon, I’m just glad that my sex is no longer on fire.

Chloe de Lullington is a writer and lifelong thrifter, interested in the repurposing of clothes and culture in contemporary life. Originally from Kent, she gained a First Class degree in English Literature and Film and Theatre from the University of Reading and now lives in Shropshire.