A Mother’s Account of an Adverse Reaction to the AstraZeneca COVID Vaccine

Vaccine Injury Awareness Month, I thought I'd share something I wrote in

my notes

in October twenty twenty-one, the month I decided to start sharing

things online.

Uh, I was twenty-three when I rolled up my sleeve,

not because I was scared for

myself, but because I was told it was something that kept them safe,

my babies.

One barely walking and the other still needing me for

everything.

Everywhere I turned, it was the same message: protect your family.

The news, social media, work, the conversations at the park,

and the quiet pressure

and raised eyebrows when you hesitated. What? You said you weren't getting it.

So I didn't hesitate. I did what mums do. I put them first, or so I thought.

I remember holding my daughter later that night after my first-ever migraine,

thinking, "What have I done?" Something responsible,

something that they'd

have me, you know, healthy, present, here for years to come.

Didn't know that that would be the beginning of losing

parts of me that I actually

never got back. It didn't happen all at once. Oh, no.

At first it was the migraine, then my heart, then my seizures came,

the spasms and

the tics that were just anxiety. The constant hospitals, referrals,

appointments after appointments, the TIA, no speech, barely walking, barely eating,

and the always having to fight for answers over and over again.

Then more tests, more confusion, constantly going through hoop after hoop

after

hoop and getting absolutely nowhere.

Words I'd never had before becoming part of my everyday life.

Then finally, after months of just aches and anxiety,

a diagnosis and then another

diagnosis, and then we bounced back from diagnosis to

diagnosis.

But the only one that actually mattered to me

was the one that they told me first,

an adverse reaction to the AstraZeneca COVID jab.

And then the list kept growing, bouncing from referral to referral.

It sounds clinical when it's all written down, neat,

contained, but it's not.

It's messy. It's leaving my job, losing my license, my independence,

and the

ability to even be able to take my children for a simple walk because I

couldn't

even walk myself. It's canceling days out because the light

is too bright, the

noise is too loud, or my body is simply too weak.

It's my children watching me shake or struggle to stand or disappear behind a

mountain of symptoms and chronic illnesses.

It's my babies asking on good days, "Mummy, are you better now?"

And not knowing

how to answer. I trusted what I was told by doctors

and the people I stupidly and

naively thought were protecting us.

Ooh, there's a guilt-- There's a kind of guilt

that comes along with this, a

nauseating constant ache.

Not because I made a reckless choice, but because I made what I thought was a

careful one, and I still ended up here. People don't always know what to say.

Some avoid it altogether. Some question, some dismiss, but most don't see the daily

reality, the way every small moment is measured now against what I can manage,

what

my body will allow. I'm still their mother,

even on the days that the-- even on the

days where the world is too loud, too bright, and too heavy, even

when my body

feels like something I no longer recognize, I'm still here trying,

loving the only

way I know how,

completely