Genital warts

Cryotherapy round three and they keep coming back

Third freezing session and new ones have appeared each time about a fortnight later. It is starting to feel pointless and the appointments are wearing me down more than the warts are.

Did anyone get through this? How long did it take before they actually stopped?

longwayround 3 months ago

NoteMember experience, not medical advice. Symptoms overlap between infections and only a test can tell them apart.

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almostfine 3 months ago

Yes, and this stage is the demoralising one. What was explained to me is that treatment removes what is visible, but the virus is still in the surrounding skin for a while, so new ones appearing between sessions isn’t the treatment failing. It’s the timeline.

Mine took several months and then stopped. The last stretch felt like it would never end and then it just did.

second_tuesday 3 months ago

Ask about switching or combining approaches if the current one is grinding you down. There are topical options as well as the in-clinic physical ones and clinics often move people between them.

Also worth asking how long they’d expect to keep going before rethinking. Having a number to hold onto made the appointments easier.

held_note 3 months ago

Numbers helped me here, so: roughly a third of people get at least one recurrence, and that holds across treatment methods and even when warts clear on their own. In the studies the first recurrence typically turns up around the three to four month mark rather than years later.

So round three at this point is squarely inside the expected pattern, not evidence that your particular case is unusually stubborn. It felt different once I stopped reading each new one as a failure.

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