By the time Alisha Trafford began using Mounjaro in February, she felt exhausted by years of failed weight loss attempts. The 25 year old from Hull said her weight had fluctuated since her teenage years, and a diagnosis of PCOS only made things harder to manage. She wanted something that would finally help her feel in control of her body.
The early results felt almost immediate. The injections helped her lose weight faster than anything she had tried before, and her PCOS symptoms also began to ease. Everyday life felt lighter, and she believed she had finally found something that worked when nothing else had.
She said: “I’ve tried different things to lose weight, but it’s never really been as successful as Mounjaro was. Mounjaro was also helping my PCOS symptoms, and it was just making my life better.” At the time, she felt hopeful and relieved.
After purchasing the medication from an online pharmacy, she lost 3.5 stone in just three months. She felt encouraged by the progress and did not suspect anything was wrong. Her focus stayed on the changes she was seeing and how much better she felt overall.
By May, things began to shift. Alisha noticed abdominal pain that lingered, but she dismissed it at first and carried on as normal. One day while at work, the pain suddenly became overwhelming and she asked to go home.
She said: “Then one day the pain got really, really intense. I asked my manager to go home from work, and that’s when it all really started to go downhill.” Within hours, she was vomiting repeatedly and the pain kept getting worse instead of easing.
She said: “The pain was getting more intense and it felt quite similar to what I imagine a heart attack would feel like.” Doctors later told her she was suffering from acute pancreatitis, caused by severe inflammation of the pancreas.
Despite treatment with fluids and painkillers, her condition continued to worsen. Doctors later found she had pancreatic necrosis, meaning part of her pancreatic tissue had died, which put her at risk of sepsis. She was extremely weak and spent most of her time sleeping through the pain.
She said: “The only thing they could put it down to was Mounjaro.” Because she could not eat during her hospital stays, she lost another two stone. By August, she struggled to speak and said it was only after meeting a consultant that she understood how serious things were.
She then said: “He couldn’t actually quite believe I was sitting there and talking.” She was later hospitalised again on 6 December and told pancreas issues were likely to be lifelong. Now, she urges others to be careful, saying: “Just be careful. Don’t ignore any pain and something doesn’t feel right, get it checked.”
