"I told the people at UHS that I wasn't going to leave until they gave me a mono test," she says. "So they did."

Several months earlier, Harkavy tested negative for mono at the UHS night clinic, but her symptoms persisted. She had a sore throat with white spots and thought she might have had mono. But when she came back, she was not given the mono blood test again.

"For some reason, the people at UHS couldn't put it all together, that I had mono, even though my friends all told me I did," Harkavy says. "The nurse practitioners kept thinking I had strep throat. I told [them] I did not have strep. I had a million strep tests, but [they] didn't give me mono tests."

The test results confirmed that she had mononucleosis.

Harkavy says some of her problems with diagnosis may have stemmed from the fact that she never actually saw a doctor.

"I saw nurse practitioners who didn't really have time for me," she says, "so I didn't get diagnosed when I should have been."

Harkavy is not the only student who has had problems with mono diagnosis at UHS. A sophomore woman, who asked not to be named, missed 10 days of school last April because of mono.

She was not given the mono blood test at UHS, she says.

"They took a throat culture," she says. "They like doing those."

"They told me I didn't have mono, that it was all in my mind, that I was overstressed, that it was just colds going around, that they hadn't heard of anyone having mono," she says. "They just wouldn't believe me. They thought I was crazy."

So the woman went to an outside doctor who administered the test and confirmed that she had mono.

"Go to UHS first, but if you don't get what you want, go somewhere else," she says.

Rosenthal says students are only given the mono test if they have developed symptoms other than a sore throat.

"We don't do a mono spot test on everyone with a sore throat," he says. "People come in early with no swollen glands."

If a student's illness gets worse, or if it gets better and then returns, he or she will get a mono test, he says.