Something else? Ask Aunt Vadge – bottom left of your screen!
Dear Aunt Vadge,
I have a vaginal infection that will not go away! Here’s what I’ve tried:
- Vitamin C with rosehip tablets inserted into my vagina.
- Douching with hydrogen peroxide and apple cider vinegar.
- An obgyn prescribed flagyl for seven days. I thought it went away, but it came right back.
In short, I’ve tried everything, but it won’t shift. The weird thing is I have yellowish discharge (not yellow-green) with no smell. This morning I woke up with white pasty discharge, again no smell – I’ve never had a fishy odour this whole time.
Anyway, I douched with hydrogen peroxide again and inserted two acidophilus tablets. I noticed my finger had a slight fishy odour when I took it out. I’ve tested for STIs and everything came back negative. Please help – I feel helpless and hopeless, and I don’t know if it’s BV, a yeast infection, or something else.
Sincerely,
Infected
USA, age 19
Dear Infected,
That sounds exhausting, and you’ve been working so hard at it – but the missing piece is a diagnosis. You’ve been throwing treatment after treatment at something nobody has actually identified, and that’s the real reason it keeps coming back. Different infections need different treatments, and guessing in the dark only occasionally lands. This exact loop – treat, briefly better, straight back again – is a story we know well clinically, which is why here at My Vagina we look at the whole picture: what isn’t changing that’s keeping the infection there? If the treatments are fit for the job, they should work – so if they don’t, the treatment isn’t targeting the right problem.
A couple of clues from your description. A faint fishy odour points towards BV, but yellowish discharge with no smell can point to aerobic vaginitis instead – a different imbalance that standard BV and yeast swabs often miss entirely. So you could well have been testing negative while something real was going on.
The single most useful thing you can do is get a comprehensive vaginal microbiome test, which reads the full bacterial and yeast picture rather than just the usual few. That’s how you stop guessing. If you’re going through a doctor, go back and specifically ask them to test for BV, yeast and aerobic bacteria, and don’t let them fob you off.
One important practical tip: for about a week before any test, don’t put anything in your vagina – no douches, probiotics, vitamin C or acidophilus. All of those clear out or suppress the very bacteria the test needs to detect, so testing straight after treating can give a falsely clean result. Let things settle first, then test.
Once you know what it is, it becomes treatable. If it does turn out to be BV, our free how to treat BV guide walks through the whole approach – but a diagnosis comes first. And a gentle word: the repeated rounds of antibiotics and douching can themselves knock down your protective bacteria and keep the cycle going, so the goal is to identify the driver and rebuild, not just keep attacking.
Write back and let me know what it turns out to be.
Warmest regards,
Aunt Vadge
This is general information, not a substitute for personalised medical advice.
- Van Der Pol B. Diagnosing Vaginal Infections: It’s Time to Join the 21st Century. Current Infectious Disease Reports. 2010;12(3):225–230.
- Sobel JD, Hay P. Diagnostic techniques for bacterial vaginosis and vulvovaginal candidiasis – requirement for a simple differential test. Expert Opinion on Medical Diagnostics. 2010;4(4):333–341.
