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After developing a severe thrush infection, Philly Baines says chronic vulval pain left her bedbound and suicidal – something she says could have been avoided with the right support. And when she shared her experience online last year, the comment section was flooded with other women detailing hauntingly similar experiences

By Hannah BradfieldPublished: 06 May 2026

Before becoming seriously unwell at the age of 32, Philly Baines, now 35, says she was lucky enough to have never experienced any health problems. With a successful copywriting career and an upcoming wedding, life was good – until ‘one bad thrush infection destroyed everything’. While she was prone to it and had been plagued by infections around once a year for the previous decade, Philly says she had never been warned about any potential long-term risks or complications of thrush.

By 2022, Philly was on her 10th thrush infection, and when she had an IUD fitted – which she was told may increase thrush risk – the length of her infections doubled from seven to 14 days, and she got them more frequently. By this point, says Philly, ‘a certain amount of drug resistance had developed’. Yet, her infections were still treated as routine with oral and topical antifungals – including when she later developed an infection that lasted for two months. However, while incredibly annoying, Philly says she still wasn’t that concerned at this point because she hadn’t found any information suggesting thrush could be in any way dangerous.

When that medication didn’t work, an online pharmacy prescribed Philly pessaries, and her latest infection subsided. However, she says, a burning feeling remained at what she now knows is the vulvar vestibule. So, she sought help from a thrush doctor at a GUM (Genitourinary Medicine) clinic, who couldn’t identify the pain source after tests came back negative. The advice? Salt-water baths every day for three months.

Thankfully, over the next six months, the pain eased, and both grateful for the relief and deterred by a nine-month gynaecology NHS waiting list – and no spare £350 for a private appointment – Philly ceased digging into what might have been going on. But the following year, thrush – and the burning – returned, and salt-water baths didn’t touch the sides for her pain this time.

After shelling out to see a thrush expert privately, Philly was diagnosed with Cytolytic Vaginosis (which remains a debated diagnosis within women’s health due to a lack of high-quality research and no universally agreed diagnostic thresholds). After explaining that she had ‘burning at the opening of my vagina, not the inside’, the doctor told her that he thought she did have internal pain, and that ‘too many good bacteria’ was behind the burning. He suggested she douche with bicarbonate of soda for three months for symptom relief. It didn’t work, and Philly called his secretary to say as much. ‘The only women the doctor can’t help are those who think they know more than him,’ she says was her actual response.

‘She said: “The only women the doctor can’t help are those who think they know more than him”’

Hoping to be pain-free for her upcoming wedding, Philly persisted and was prescribed broad-spectrum antibiotics, which had thrush listed as a side effect. Indeed, after taking the antibiotics, she developed ‘nuclear thrush’.

Further medical opinions, says Philly, confirmed Cytolytic Vaginosis had been misdiagnosed, and that she did in fact have nerve damage. Even then, she adds, there was no warnings about the dangers a further thrush infection could pose. Even private vulva clinics didn’t seem particularly concerned. ‘It was all very like: you’ve got 20 minutes with me, that’s £350, go away.’

A summer of back-to-back thrush ‘pushed the pain up from a 2/10 all the way up to 6/7 – that’s when it all went to shit’, recalls Philly. ‘I spent my life sitting largely on an ice pack. It felt like someone would push my legs apart and get a cattle brand and push it on my genitals every day, which was horrific,’ she says, adding that she couldn’t work, leave the house or have a ‘relationship with my partner’.

Philly's life was put on hold following a two-month thrush infection that left her with chronic vulval pain.

Accessing help was made even harder, Philly adds, by a lack of communication between healthcare professionals. ‘I call it the women's health referral railroad, because for all our conditions, there are no pathways,’ she says. ‘There's no urgency with pain, even though the burden of high-impact chronic pain is catastrophic.’

‘It felt like someone would push my legs apart and get a cattle brand and push it on my genitals’

‘Once you end up with the term vulvodynia [vulval pain], you're then having to become a PhD researcher to figure out how to get the pain down.’

There’s been a light at the end of the tunnel for Philly – but only very recently and after spending, with the help of her family, around £80,000 over three years trying to find an effective treatment. For her, that’s been a spinal cord stimulator, which she credits with saving her life.

‘I now basically have a permanently electrified tailbone,’ explains Philly, ‘which is distracting the nerves, so I don't feel pain so much as just tingling all the time’.

‘I really thought I was toast; I thought I was going to die and now I'm going to be okay.’

‘My single message to women and doctors is that we have to take thrush seriously, and I'm campaigning for two sentences to be added to the NHS thrush page to highlight a causal link between thrush and vulval nerve damage.’

‘Women who have less than four recurrent thrush infections don’t come under the definition of recurrent thrush, but they should be eligible for specialist care in vulval clinics. This is far easier to prevent than cure.’

‘I’m campaigning for two sentences to be added to the NHS thrush page’

Vulvovaginal disorders, feels Philly, are ‘the last [health] black hole; the last taboo’, due to an antiquated notion that the vulva is somehow ‘sexually explicit’ (indeed, the auto-generated transcript of our interview censored every mention of the word ‘vulva’). ‘And if women aren't being safeguarded from preventable health conditions, that's not on them. That's on all of us as a society.’

It’s why Philly – now a self-proclaimed 'thrushfluencer' – is set on sharing her own story as far and wide as possible – and to get more people talking about vulvas. ‘The more this story gets out, the more we can prevent it.’