I’m a 36-year-old mother of three. I’m usually a very active multitasker as I’m a full-time classroom teacher as well. Prior to the vaccine I’ve never had any health issues other than mild asthma. I didn’t even have a GP, now I have a whole team of specialists.
I got the vaccine because I was worried about losing my job and not being able to feed my children or support the kids in my class who had already been through so much with lockdowns. Other members of staff had already been stood down for non-compliance and I felt like I had to step up to the plate and look after these children. I couldn’t abandon my class.
I got the Pfizer vaccine on the 21st of August, 2021. I had the standard sore arm which I expected, a bit of a fever and a headache. I noticed my shoulders were a bit sore but because I was so busy I just got on with it. I didn’t think it was a concern. Now that I have had covid, I can say that it felt very much like that for about three weeks.
The 11th of September was the morning I was booked in for my second vaccine. I woke up to my husband telling me the ambulance was on the way. Before I get into the details, I want to mention that my daughters and husband had the most traumatic experience from this. My husband spent five hours not knowing if I was alive or dead, not being able to go inside the hospital or communicate with me because of the covid rules. The last he saw was me not breathing, blue in the face with blood coming out of my mouth convulsing. It’s a bit of a blur, but I remember waking up in a resuscitation bay roughly five hours later, talking to him on the phone being totally distraught and out of sorts.
They ran bloods and did a CT scan. The CT came back clear but the blood work was consistent with somebody who had a tonic clonic seizure. They gave me a discharge summary and told me just to follow up with my GP and a neurologist and sent me home. They saw that I had that I had my second Pfizer vaccine appointment today and told me to hold off at this stage.
I got home and had to nurse myself, my tongue was red raw with lacerations from being bitten during my seizures. It was extremely hard to eat anything and I was just pretty much living off icy poles and soft foods. I had severe brain fog and I couldn’t put a clear thought together. I had extreme tinnitus (like over the top of the tv loud), it was driving me mad. I can understand why Van Gogh cut his ears off now!
On the 17th of September I went to a GP who was very dismissive of me. I was asking him for an exemption because I’d had a seizure, but he was treating me like I was making the whole thing up. He said there was no correlation between the vaccine and seizures. He told me I was fine and to just get the second one, which left me feeling defeated and stupid.
So that day I bit the bullet and went though with it. I got my second Pfizer vaccine on the 17th of September, because my work was pressuring me that school was a high risk setting. They said if I didn’t have the vaccine I would lose my job, and let down 50+ kids who’d already lost their teacher.
I continued to experience the symptoms that I explained above for the next two weeks, until I had my next episode on the 3rd of October. My husband wasn’t home this time, my poor brother-in-law was there. From what I was told, I went stiff and fell off the couch, and proceeded to convulse in a seizure. Again, I went blue and blood was coming out of my mouth from biting my tongue.
I was taken by ambulance again, and put in an emergency bay. They were run off their feet so they were quite dismissive of me until I woke up in the resuscitation bay again with a neck brace on, having had another seizure while in hospital. They then started to take me a little more seriously and asked me about my vaccine timeline.
The bloods came back with low platelets and high potassium, which explained all the bruises over my body and why they were worried about me having a heart attack. They admitted me overnight and discharged me at 8am the following morning without papers. They told me I had epilepsy. Keppra was prescribed to me, which is an anti-seizure medicine that I apparently have to take for the rest of my life.
I started experiencing more symptoms, including: blood in my urine and in my stool; infections/swelling in my lymph nodes; extreme tinnitus; and heavy brain fog.
It was time to get serious, so I did my research and found a GP who genuinely cared about what was happening to me. He ended up putting me in hospital under the care of a specialist GP. He did lots of tests. Pretty much all of October I had a blood test every single day, an MRI which came back clear, and a lumbar puncture which showed protein in my CFS fluid. This indicates damage to my blood brain barrier. All my symptoms were pointing to MS or brain tumours but they couldn’t find anything. I had an EEG for seven days but it showed no sign of epilepsy. They said there was one spike but it wasn’t consistent with epilepsy.
This brings me to the current day, it’s been seven months since my first seizure and five months seizure free. It just leaves me more convinced that if I had never had the vaccine I’d be seizure free. My current symptoms are tinnitus, anxiety, heavy fatigue, brain fog, muscle pain, headaches, noise and light sensitivity and loss of appetite. I am no longer able to drive, and can’t work due to covid at the moment because I’m in isolation. From here on I have no idea where this path leads.
Now that I have covid I have had several phone calls from doctors giving overwhelming support, but when I was critically ill there was nothing but me fighting for my own life.