Swollen Lip Following Filler Procedure Leads to Woman Being Diagnosed With Leukemia 

An unexpected swollen lip during a lip filler procedure led a British woman to discover she had leukemia. 

In April 2023, Edita Jucaite, 36, was getting a dermal filler procedure and when it was injected into her lip it immediately swelled up. Jucaite was modeling for a dentist colleague who was learning how to do the injections under trainer Dr. Brian Franks. 

The medical professionals were concerned and suggested she went to see her doctor because it was a “consequence of treatment” they had not experienced before, Dr. Franks told BBC. 

During the same time, Jucaite said she was also experiencing bruising on other parts of her body that were not a result of bumping into something. She wasn’t going to see a doctor, but the next day a large bruise spread outside her lip and on the inside of her mouth. A colleague, who previously lost her sister to cancer, suggested going to the doctors as she also noticed Jucaite was losing weight, and she wasn’t trying to. 

The swelling went away a few days later, but after researching symptoms online, Jucaite decided to book an appointment with her doctor. She took a blood test and was told before the end of the day it was possible she had leukemia and needed to go to the hospital. 

“It was awful, such a shock, I burst into tears,” Jucaite recalled to the BBC. 

At Churchill Hospital in Oxford, she was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia, which is chronic, but treatable. She immediately began taking chemotherapy tablets, and when her blood count was stable she switched to the drug Imatinib, which she’ll now have to take for the rest of her life. 

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

Papacleovoulou added that while Jucaite is extremely lucky to have been diagnosed through cosmetic surgery as most of the time people are diagnosed because they felt “extremely unwell.” 

“Not many people can say having lip filler saved their life, but I can,” Jucaite said.