Sammy had been anticipating going to college for what felt l…

Sammy had been anticipating going to college for what felt like ages. After a few weeks of weeks of studying and weekends spent partying, Sammy soon found her way to the women’s health clinic due to pain while urinating. During her appointment, the nurse asked Sammy a bunch of uncomfortable questions, such as, “Have you been sexually active in the last year?” Sammy nervously replied, “Um, yeah.” The nurse explained that she would perform a vaginal swab in order to screen for different types of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including gonorrhea, chlamydia, and trichomonas. She also suggested doing blood work to test for HIV, syphilis, hepatitis B and C. She explained to Sammy, “Many people who contract STDs have no symptoms at all, and if symptoms such as abnormal discharge or burning during urination do appear, they may not even occur until several weeks after sex with an infected partner. This can lead people who are asymptomatic to spread the STD to other partners without knowing it. It’s always a good idea to get tested at least once during the year if you are sexually active. We’ll get the results from your blood work and vaginal swab in one to two days, and we’ll let you know what our next steps will be for treatment, if necessary. If you do need any treatment, we’ll set up a follow-up appointment and get you taken care of.” The next day, Sammy’s test results came back from the health clinic and she was officially diagnosed with chlamydia. When she returned to the health clinic, she was given a prescription for an antibiotic treatment of doxycycline. The nurse told her to take one antibiotic pill in the morning and one pill at night for seven days straight. Two days into Sammy’s treatment, she started to feel better. She tried to follow the instructions given by the nurse, but things were getting hectic with her schoolwork, so on the third morning she forgot to take a morning pill. The next night, she took two pills to compensate. On the fourth day of her treatment, Sammy forgot to take the antibiotics. Since she had been feeling better anyway, she stopped taking the antibiotic pills altogether. What infection was Sammy diagnosed with? This disease is caused by a . Doxycycline is a(n) that targets the . It was almost two weeks later when in the middle of the night, Sammy woke up with a stabbing pain in her lower abdomen. She got up to go to the bathroom, but it hurt so much to pee. She was also burning up due to a high fever.  Why do you think she felt sick two weeks after taking the antibiotic pills? At the hospital, the doctor ran some tests and finally came back with the results. “Your test results show that you have a chlamydia infection and we believe that as a complication, you might have pelvic inflammatory disease, or PID. PID can occur when a chlamydia infection goes untreated, and travels upwards from the cervix or vagina into the reproductive organs. PID can explain your lower abdominal pain, fever, and pelvic tenderness. We’re going to give you an intramuscular injection and a round of antibiotics in order to treat the infection and PID.” What is a benefit of an intramuscular injection compared to orally taken medication? Sammy was treated for the infection and she learned about the importance of proper antibiotic usage. This time Sammy made sure to finish her full seven-day course of doxycycline treatment. Although she felt better on Day 3 of her treatment, she knew she had to finish the whole course of antibiotics. She wondered what would have happened if she had never experienced any symptoms from the chlamydia infection. Would she ever have found out she had it? Would she have gotten PID? What if she spread the infection to other people without even knowing it? And then they spread it to more people without knowing it? How crazy! she thought. She had never thought of herself as someone who would get an STD, but everything had happened so quickly; and she knew she and her partner should have used a condom. Even though she was slightly embarrassed to have to inform her sexual partner, she really felt proud of herself for dealing with the situation maturely. Sammy committed to getting an STD screen every year, and informed her close friends about the significance ofantibiotic resistance. After doing some research on the CDC website, she realized that infection rates of a lot of STDs were steadily increasing every year. As a pre-med student, she now felt passionately that one day she would help to combat this growing epidemic. 
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