When TikToker Alexandra (@takidaddi) was in her first year of college, she ended up hospitalized for a week due to an urgent care misdiagnosis. Here’s what happened.
Just a month into her first year, she suddenly started feeling sick, tired, and lethargic. She decided to go to urgent care. She was tested for a few different things, including strep throat, but nothing came back positive.
Since her symptoms seemed to look a lot like strep throat, she was given amoxicillin and was sent on her way.
She began taking the medicine, but after a week, she still wasn’t feeling any better. In fact, she had gotten worse. One morning, she woke up and was unable to swallow her saliva.
She had to spit it all out into a trash can. She also couldn’t get out of bed to go to class. She felt super weak and just lay down on the floor.
When her roommate returned from class, she took Alexandra to urgent care because she looked terrible. Her lymph nodes were enlarged, her voice wasn’t working properly, and she couldn’t breathe very well. Once they got to urgent care, her roommate did all the talking.
The nurses ran a test and discovered that Alexandra had mono. She was immediately transferred to the emergency room and hooked up to a bunch of machines.
“Amoxicillin makes mono flare to the point that it can kill you,” said Alexandra. “Turns out I ended up with the fatal kind of mono, and it would not have turned out that way if I hadn’t been misdiagnosed first.”
“If I had just been immediately diagnosed with mono, it would have never flared like that, but it got so bad, I ended up in the hospital for a week.”
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For the first four days in the hospital, she was put on a liquid diet. After a week, she was discharged and almost had to drop out of her first semester of school because she had missed so many of her classes.
It took a long time for her to recover. Even after a month, her lymph nodes were still swollen. Now, she’s hoping to prevent this from happening to anyone else by sharing her story.
“Please advocate for yourself always because sometimes, they’re looking out for your best interests, but sometimes, they just want you in and out,” she concluded.
In the comments section, many TikTok users shared their own unpleasant experiences with being sick, particularly with mono.
“Same thing happened to me!!!! Misdiagnosed with strep throat, ended up with mono. Except the amoxicillin caused me to also break out in a horrible rash from head to toe. We’re talking worse than chicken pox!!! When I went to the ER, there were doctors coming into my room just to look at the rash because they couldn’t believe it,” commented one user.
“This happened to me, too. A few years ago, I went in July, and the doctor said it was just a virus and you have to let it run its course. I was on my deathbed and had to fight tears on my way out. Ended up back at my regular doctor the next week, and sure enough, it was mono,” wrote another.
“When I got mono, it was freshman year of high school, and I was sick for months. Just taking the four, maybe five steps to the bathroom would exhaust me! Mono sucks,” added a third.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
