A mom took to TikTok with a crazy claim that she and her husband had been accidentally poisoning their family for weeks — and believe it or not, it's true! TikToker @kelsewhatelse says that she, her husband, and her preschooler came down with a mystery illness every Monday for nine weeks before she figured out what was going on.
Much to her surprise, it turns out their symptoms could be traced back to the peanut butter recall that first made headlines in May. When a doctor suggested it, she didn't think it possible, because she had already checked the peanut butter she had at home, but it turns out, a different product was the culprit.
They'd all had the "Monday Sickies" for weeks.
The TikTok mom explained in the video which has now garnered over 410,000 likes, that for nine weeks, her family had been suffering from what they'd dubbed, "the Monday Sickies." They mysteriously only got sick on Mondays, and the symptoms were always the same: about 12 hours of fever and 12 hours of "stomach cramps or diarrhea."
Interestingly, her baby never got sick, but she, her husband and their older child all did at different times. She explained they sometimes "rotated who was getting sick."
They were confused and desperate.
They couldn't explain why it was only on Mondays, why it wasn't all of them at the same time or why the baby never got sick. "We cleaned the entire house. We didn't invite anybody over for two months. We didn't see anybody for two months, cuz we thought we were gonna get them sick. My son missed so much preschool," @kelsewhatelse proclaims in the TikTok video.
She only discovered what was going on by chance.
So then, when the mom ended up at the emergency room in the middle of the night, for an unrelated issue, she ended up mentioning what had been going on with them to the doctor, he suggested peanut butter might be the problem.
"I was like, 'no that can't be possible, I checked our peanut butter. I saw the recall. I went, I checked our big things of peanut butter, we were fine. I told my husband, I checked the peanut butter, we're fine,' so I told him that couldn't possibly be it," she explained.
There was another peanut butter product in the house.
It turns out, that on the weekends while she was sleeping and her husband was on kid duty, he had been using individual snack-size peanut butter cups that were in the back of the pantry that she knew nothing about.
She says that once they realized what was going on, it made perfect sense that her son and husband were always the sickest and the baby — who doesn't eat peanut butter — never got sick. "Most of this happened before they even recalled the peanut butter," she said.
So, they had been "poisoning" themselves for weeks without knowing it.
"Turns out we've been giving ourselves salmonella poisoning for nine weeks, and the reason none of us ever caught it is because we were using the snack-size portion, so it was never enough to send us to the hospital, but it was just enough to make us sick every Monday for nine weeks!" the mom exclaimed.
The recall was recently expanded.
Jif recently recalled even more products that are made using its peanut butter. The recall now encompasses about 50 different products and some 20 different companies that use Jif brand peanut butters in their products have also issued recalls.
So, PSA: check all of your cupboards for any and all peanut butter products that might be recalled.
