<p>Oh Hanna, that sounds aweful! I had mono five years ago and I have never been so sick. I could hardly lift my arms and slept for days at a time. How did you eventually get diagnosed?</p>
<p>I went to the clinic at the beginning of exam week and was told I had the flu. I took all my exams that week (end of the first year of law school), then went home and spent a week at my summer job (going to bed at 6:30 every night). At the end of the first week home, I couldn’t get out of bed. My mother’s internist took one look at my neck and gave me a mono test. By that time, my liver was very unhappy. I spent the next 8 weeks in bed; it took about two weeks before my liver was back on track.</p>
<p>The weird part? I took all my exams with that fever, and my GPA went up .4 compared to first semester. Random.</p>
<p>My good friend topped this when he was hit by a car on Memorial Drive. Student health sent him home without X-raying his leg, and the next day when he hobbled back to the hospital unable to walk, they found that his tibia was fractured all the way through. The orthopedist told him that if he had waited one more hour before coming back to the hospital, they would have had to operate and re-break the bone.</p>
<p>But you never know what you will get. The year after that, when I needed to have some simple surgery, I decided to avoid student health because I didn’t trust them to make a good scar. So I found a professor of plastic surgery who also had an MIT PhD in wound healing, and I paid him $1200 out of pocket to do the 20-minute operation (student health would have been free). You will probably guess that my expensive specialist failed to diagnose a postoperative infection, and I ended up with a big, wide scar.</p>
<p>Hanna,
That’s so not fair! I can’t believe that you went that long w/o treatment and that you actually were walking around and studying for exams. I lost whole weeks when I was recovering and had to bring in help to care for my kids and the house. I lost 25 pounds and looked like something out of a horror movie. I was lucky. I was really only on bedrest for about three weeks, but I was not myself for a couple of months and I lost 25 pounds. I looked like a walking skeleton. Very scary.</p>
<p>I actually gained weight when I had mono. My doctor told me: you’re eating a healthy diet right now, and that’s what your body is used to, so keep eating the same things whether you are hungry or not. Come to find out, my usual diet will pack on the pounds when I don’t leave the house for 8 weeks. 
Between the extra weight and the unhappy liver and spleen, I looked like I was six months pregnant. <em>shudder</em> I was very glad to be up and around again.</p>