Woman Credits Lip Filler with ‘Saving My Life’ After Injections Lead to Cancer Diagnosis: ‘Such a Shock’

A woman is crediting lip filler for saving her life after it led to her cancer diagnosis.

In April 2023, Edita Jucaite from Oxfordshire, England, decided to get lip filler. She had previously gotten similar cosmetic procedures without any reactions. However, immediately after the injections, the 36-year-old dental nurse noticed a problem.

"When the dermal filler went into my lip it immediately swelled up," she said, according to BBC.

The swelling later turned into a bruise. The doctor who administered the filler, Dr. Brian Franks, and Jucaite’s colleague both expressed concern, urging her to visit her general practitioner.

“The next day a large bruise had spread outside my lip and on the inside of my mouth," she 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."

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

Jucaite ultimately visited her GP for testing and was later diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia. CML is a rare form of blood cancer that affects the bone marrow, according to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

"It was awful, such a shock, I burst into tears," she said of her diagnosis. "I couldn’t hear or think of anything else apart from the fact I might die."

Jucaite was treated with oral chemotherapy and will have to take another medication for life to prevent the cancer from returning. She is now in remission.

Additionally, the bruising on her lip disappeared after a month of medication.

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Jucaite recalled getting previous bruises on other parts of her body — without bumping into something — and only later realized it was likely a sign of the cancer.

"Unexplained bruising is one of the symptoms for leukemia, as well as unexplained bleeding, recurrent infections, and extreme fatigue, so these symptoms are non-specific and usually people will not connect it with leukemia," said Dr. Georgia Papacleovoulou, head of policy and advocacy at Leukaemia UK, BBC reports. "[Jucaite is] very, very lucky to be diagnosed through cosmetic surgery."

Jucaite admitted that without the lip filler appointment, she wouldn't have been diagnosed so quickly.

"Not many people can say having lip fillers saved their life, but I can,” she said. "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."