OP I'm really sorry this happened to you, I think you just got extremely unlucky. This entire series of events sort of reminds me of the Swiss cheese model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model). Glad to hear you're doing better now, did you end up contacting your university in order to explain how their policy (among other things) affected you? Your insight might help out the next person who gets extremely unlucky.