I got mine when I was 13 or 14, unbearable pain for a week or 2, I couldn’t sit at all and eventually it got so bad I couldn’t even sleep. My mom finally took me to the ER where a bunch of residents told me they had no idea what it was, until eventually a dr came in and drained it while I was under local anesthesia (my mom says the smell was terrible).
I had to stay in the hospital overnight and when the dr removed the gauze from the incision it was probably the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced. This was the beginning of the summer, the rest of the summer I had a visiting nurse come every day to pack it, it took a long time to heal completely. It came back again a year or 2 later and the doctor decided to do an open excision. This wasn’t too bad, but the visiting nurse had to come to my school every day to change the packing for several weeks after, which is really hard to deal with in high school.
It came back again last year (my senior year), draining with a vengeance to the point where I had to constantly have a pad on the back of my underwear. I went to the doctor several times, who treated it with some silver nitrate and told me to keep removing the hair and it would close on its own. This never happened, so I started seeing a new doctor who talked me into getting a wound vac for it. This was a great decision, while it was embarrassing to lug around a machine with tubing coming out of the back of your pants (Especially during the summer) it only took 3 weeks for it to close up, which I had been waiting probably over a year at that point to happen.
Now I’m a freshman in college and I’m starting to get the tell-tale discomfort while sitting/laying on my back, and I’m trying to will it away. I thought I had finally gotten rid of it for good, but only about 3 months after removing the wound vac I think I can feel it coming back. My doctor at home gave me the number for another doctor here, which I’m praying I don’t have to use.
Side note: I refer to my cyst as my “J. Lo.” The first doctor I had told me I have what he likes to call “a J. Lo booty” which led to the cyst being formed, and since then that’s what my family and friends refer to it as. So much easier to tell my mom/friends that “my J. Lo is acting up” than saying “cyst,” especially when there’s other people around.