Teen takes antibiotic, burns 'from inside-out'

A California teen is in intensive care after she took a friend's antibiotic and wound up with an ailment that is burning her body from the inside-out.

Yaasmeen Castanada, 19, is fighting for her life in the burn unit of the University of California Irvine Medical Center after a diagnosis with a life-threatening drug reaction called Stevens-Johnson Syndrome.

"It's heartbreaking," Laura Corona, Yaasmeen's mother, told ABC News. "(It's) just unreal, just watching your daughter burn in front of you."

On Thanksgiving, the sophomore at California State University, Los Angeles, and mother of a 4-month-old baby was coming down with cold symptoms and had a sore throat, so she took an antibiotic offered to her by a friend, Corona said on the web page for a medical fundraising campaign for Yaasmeen.

As the night went on, the teen's eyes and throat began to burn, her eyes turned red and she was rushed to the hospital, according to her mother. Her body was covered with gigantic blisters, according to ABC News.

On Dec. 5, she underwent surgery on the top portion of her body, and hospital staff members have scraped the skin on her body to encourage new growth, her mother said on the GoFundMe webpage.

The syndrome is a rare and extreme reaction to medication or an infection, according to the Mayo Clinic. It can begin with flu-like symptoms, but results in the top layer of skin dying and shedding, according to Mayo.

"It can be considered sort of a burn from the inside-out," physician Lawrence Matt, a dermatologist based in Santa Monica, Calif., told ABC News.

Corona advises that people make sure they do not take others' medications and also have an awareness about their own allergies.