Lips feel like sunburn

I cannot get my lips to heal. Always use sunscreen on them but for weeks on end they feel swollen and sore.

I have chronic lyme but feel great lately, being off treatment for years now. Trying to see if this lip problem could be start of sjogrens. Only other odd symptoms lately are hip pain and nerve pain in lower leg.

springsjean,

I have chronic Lyme, bartonella, etc, too. I was bored and somehow spotted this post. Don’t know if you will see this or not, but i had the exact same thing happen late last year. I didn’t even bother posting about it on the Lyme forum, because I have never heard anyone mention anything like it, so I assumed it wasn’t Lyme related.

Mine started around September last year and was mild and intermittent at first. By the holidays, it got much worse. It felt like they were burned from the inside out. At first I couldn’t see any visible changes, but later, they looked deeper red in places and swollen around the outer edges.

I got sick with a virus right after Thanksgiving and was on abx. Oddly, my lips cleared up a lot while on Augmentin and then got increasingly worse after.

I had been using a natural lip balm with beeswax, olive and coconut oil, and natural peppermint. I thought maybe it was the mint, so I switched to plain. Finally, I stopped the lip balm completely and switched to Vasoline. The problem went away. That was right after Christmas. Early on with the Vaseline and again at least once in the last couple of weeks, I had a slight flare, where I could feel that same burning. Thankfully, it was fleeting and didn’t go any further.

I thought maybe I was allergic to something in the lip balm, as unlikely as that seems, but I am not entirely sure. I haven’t tried using the lip balm again to find out. I also wondered if it could be MCAS related. Anyway, I thought I would mention it.