Strap in, this is a long one. Content warning for blood and vomit.
When I was 14 I got mononucleosis around the end of September. I didn't get sick until late October and remember sitting out Halloween because I was just so tired, which is how it started. I was just tired all the time. I was still sick all through November and didn't eat much on Thanksgiving and slept through most of it. After that I began to get worse, I was running constant high fevers, unable to sleep but unable to be awake. The lymph node in my neck on the right side swelled to the size of a golf ball and my parents finally took me to the doctor a few days after Thanksgiving. They gave me a rapid strep and blood test and it turned out I had strep throat on top of the mono.
I should preface this next part, the doctor I was seeing as a child did not like me. I had (still have) a lot of medical problems that she couldn't diagnose. After years of tests and no diagnosis, she finally came to the conclusion that I was lying and had slowly convinced my parents that it was likely all in my head, since there was hardly any physical evidence to back up what I was claiming. Anyways, that's all a story for another question. I just wanted to convey that this woman literally hated me.
When we got the test back she asked my parents if they thought I'd be able to swallow antibiotics in pill form. She didn't ask me, the person with the throat that would be doing the swallowing, but my parents. I asked if they could give me a shot or syrup, but she ignored me and my parents agreed that I could take the pills, since the doctor practically gave them no other option. Well, two severe throat infections make it nearly impossible to swallow water, let alone a pill these giant horse pills. Every day I'd try to take them and every time they'd get stuck and I'd cough them back up or throw them up. By the middle of December, I was just getting worse and worse. I could barely get out of bed, I was running a fever of 104 almost continuously. At that point I'd lost around 35 lbs, since I couldn't eat. I remember my dad coming in with my medication and at that point I didn't even want to try because I knew what would happen and I was so tired of throwing up because it was only making my throat worse. And he literally started crying. He hugged me and begged me to take it because he knew I was dying. I took it and threw it up.
By Christmas I had stopped eating and drinking almost entirely. I was so out of it as I watched TV on the couch Christmas night, while my parents left to visit family. I remember feeling this overwhelming sense of something being very wrong. And then I started to throw up, and there were these phone sized sheets of dried blood floating on top of fresh blood and clear fluid. We later learned that it was from my throat being so torn up from the infection that it was just continuously bleeding into my stomach at all times. I was so delirious after, barely able to call my parents. I begged them to come home, begged them to believe me that something was wrong. I passed out a little after they got me home and woke up in the waiting room where they admitted me far more quickly than I've ever been admitted.
I only remember a little bit from the hospital, the doctors running around me, needles poking everywhere, the shot of penicillin they delivered stealthily to me left butt cheek that hurt for a week after. They started morphine and fluids almost immediately. The only thing I remember hearing them say was that I was lucky, that I was only days away from dying from how dehydrated and starving I was. The strep throat had turned into Scarlet Fever like I was living in 1919.
After the penicillin, a vicodin prescription, and actual real sleep, food and fluids, I was able to start to recover in just a week. A single week. If the doctor had just given me a shot right then and there in the office, I would have been fine.
And this is the story of how I developed my distrust and anxiety for doctors and public drinking fountains.
TL;DR: I got Scarlet Fever like a 1900s Edwardian child, but lived to tell the tale.