Leukaemia survivor says lip fillers saved her life

A woman whose lip swelled up unexpectedly during a lip filler procedure discovered it was because she had leukaemia.

Edita Jucaite, 36, a dental nurse from Banbury, Oxfordshire, previously had dermal fillers without incident.

But in April 2023, during a procedure in which she also had botox injected into her eyebrows and forehead, something went wrong.

"When the dermal filler went into my lip it immediately swelled up," she explained.

Ms Jucaite had been modelling for a dentist colleague who was learning how to do the injections under trainer dentist Dr Brian Franks.

"Dr Franks and his colleague were concerned and said they wanted me to see my doctor," she said.

"What I hadn’t mentioned before we started was that I had bruises elsewhere on my body, which hadn’t been caused by me knocking into something."

Dr Franks said: "This was a consequence of treatment I had personally not encountered before.

"It appeared rather abnormal that the swelling occurred in a site and position of the lip not associated with the injection site."

The session was brought to a close, though Ms Jucaite privately had "no intention of going" to see a doctor.

"But the next day a large bruise had spread outside my lip and on the inside of my mouth," Ms Jucaite recalled.

"I was at work as normal and another colleague, who’d lost her sister to cancer, insisted that I ring my GP. She said she’d also noticed I was losing weight, which I hadn’t been trying to, and she was worried."

The swelling vanished after a few days but after researching the symptoms online, Ms Jucaite saw leukaemia was a potential cause.

She booked a GP appointment, had a blood test, and was told before the end of the day that she might have leukaemia and had to go straight to hospital.

"It was awful, such a shock, I burst into tears," she remembered.

"I couldn’t hear or think of anything else apart from the fact I might die."

She was diagnosed at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford with chronic myeloid leukaemia, which is a chronic, treatable condition.

She immediately began taking chemotherapy tablets, and when her blood count was stable she switched to the drug Imatinib, which she will have to take for life.

After a month, the bruising had disappeared.

Dr Georgia Papacleovoulou, head of policy and advocacy at Leukaemia UK, said: "Unexplained bruising is one of the symptoms for leukaemia, as well as unexplained bleeding, recurrent infections, and extreme fatigue, so these symptoms are non-specific and usually people will not connect it with leukaemia."

She said Ms Jucaite had been "very, very lucky to be diagnosed through cosmetic surgery".

She said it was not the most straightforward way to diagnose leukaemia, with 37% of people being diagnosed because they felt extremely unwell.

Ms Jucaite said: "Not many people can say having lip fillers saved their life, but I can.

"If Dr Franks and my colleague hadn’t seen the swelling on my lip for themselves and pushed me to go to the doctor, I would have put it off and put it off, and the consultant said that would have meant it would have been so much harder to treat."

She added: "I’m so grateful that I had that reaction to my treatment, which ended up saving my life."

The signs and symptoms of leukaemia include:

• Fatigue
• Unexplained weight loss
• Bruising and bleeding easily
• Enlarged lumps seen or felt underneath the skin
• Swollen and/or painful stomach
• Night sweats
• Pain in bones and joints
• Shortness of breath
• Skin rashes

Source: Leukaemia UK

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