Emily Chan
Shivaika Sewlal (@shiv_sewlal) is a social media influencer who shares about what life is like living with allergies, asthma, and eczema.
Recently, she posted a video on TikTok, documenting the severe allergic reaction she had. Even though her face was extremely swollen, she did not realize she was having a life-threatening allergic reaction and went about her day as usual at first.
The video blew up, receiving 23 million views. The creator hopes that her experience can serve as a warning to others to take action whenever they notice they’re having a reaction. In the video, Shivaika can be seen with significant swelling on her face. “Me not realizing that I’m having a life-threatening allergic reaction,” she wrote in the video’s text overlay.
While most of us would’ve rushed to the emergency room at that point, she went on to say that she wasn’t sure if she should go to the hospital because she felt “completely fine” but admitted she couldn’t see properly.
Eventually, she decided to go to the hospital and filmed her journey there, capturing a moment when the facial recognition system in her apartment building failed to recognize her because of the swelling. When she arrived at the hospital, she recorded a doctor’s voice in the background asking if she had used her adrenaline pen.
Shivaika replied that she hadn’t and then was instructed to use it the next time something like this happened again. She told the medics she hadn’t eaten anything that would cause a reaction before being informed that she must’ve touched something that affected her.
Shivaika believes that she had somehow come into contact with a peanut contaminant and rubbed her eyes afterward, which caused the swelling.
In the rest of the video, she received multiple injections and observed that the medics who were tending to her seemed stressed, which she found to be alarming since she hadn’t initially believed that the situation was so serious.
“What’s scary is that I was literally going to just take an allergy tablet and then sleep,” she said. “I thought I was being over-dramatic.”
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
