Strange bumps, a lot of pain

[Pennypanda]

My boyfriend went down on me a month before I went to college. He has tested negative to all the std tests, and the only person he was with never had sex, they only had oral. The guy who went down on me a year before him, also only went down on one other girl and she tested negative. Also I have looked up all the pictures and none the std's resemble it. My first few months in college I wore basketball shorts everyday, stopped wearing underwear, and my hygiene might not've been as top notch as it could've been. Walking across campus I'd sweat all the time, especially below the waist. So around a day or so before my period a month after starting school with 18 credit hours I noticed a bump, itchy and painful, soon it went away. Then every month around my period is have one or two bumps show. Well, 4 months later, they (2 of them) haven't gone away. The are on my labia minora. One is just a lump while the other has gotten bigger, almost like a cyst. I have a gynecologist appointment Monday, but I have no idea what's going on. Please help if you can.

[Heather]

We can't possible guess at things like this: as the bottom of every board page here states, we can't stand in for an in-person healthcare provider. No online service possibly could with something like this, because what you need is to be examined and then have your own STI testing (which you'd need even without any bumps: we can't rely on partner's testing for our own status, we need to get our own). And just for future reference, ideally, to best protect yourself from STIs, you and your partners will want to stay current with all your own testing AND use safer sex barriers: just testing alone doesn't actually offer you any protection.

Most STIs, most of the time, are asymptomatic, meaning it just doesn't make sense to go trying to look for pictures of things online. But this may or may not be an STI: this could just as easily be something like an infected pore or a benign labial cyst. To find out what it is, though, you'll just need to hang in for that GYN appointment next week.

In the meantime, if you're still experiencing pain with this, you can try taking an over-the-counter analgesic (like Ibuprofen) and see if a warm compress on the lumps/bumps help.