"I got the jab to get my life back... but instead I suffered a double brain bleed"
Previously fit and healthy 55-year-old lady now feels dismissed and belittled by hospitals as she tries to find out the truth
By Andy Smith
IN THE weeks leading up to March 22, 2021, ‘Denise’ was busy keeping herself fit by power walking and running 5,000 metres three times a week.
Today, she can barely walk uphill without a struggle.
Denise, like millions across the UK, had felt the Government’s response to Covid starting to bite and believed them when they said they would soon “get their lives back”.
So on March 22, 2021, Denise took a single dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
On April 10, 2021 she was just 10 minutes into a workout with a personal trainer when she had to stop.
“I just had this intense head pain,” she said. “It was just throbbing, I couldn’t move my neck, I had a really stiff neck, I had a constant headache.”
Four days later the intense pain happened again. Denise tried over-the-counter painkillers, then migraine tablets followed by stronger medicine prescribed by her GP, who increased the strength again when the first one did not help. He then called her in for a specific type of blood test – known as a D-Dimer, which is used to detect blood clotting. According to the website healthjade.net, a normal result is less than 250ng/ml D-Dimer Units.
Denise’s reading came back at more than 800ng/ml.
“Within two hours of the test, I got a call from the GP telling me that I had a really high D-Dimer level – I think it was 837 – and that I needed to go to A&E immediately, which I did. I was then given a CT scan which showed that I had two brain bleeds.”
Passed around three hospitals, no one willing to investigate the cause
Denise spent eight days in Harlow Hospital. She was told she would be transferred to Queen’s Hospital in Romford which has a specialist neurologist department, but that did not happen as Queen’s asked for a more detailed scan to be done first.
That scan revealed the bleeding had stopped, prompting a referral instead to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, which has neurology and neurosurgery departments.
Nine months after she was diagnosed with subarachnoid haemorrhage, she is yet to be seen by an NHS specialist and feels stuck in a loop, being passed around three hospitals.
“I finally got an appointment last week because I complained to my GP and they have managed to get me an appointment at Harlow Hospital for February 4 – but within 10 minutes the neurologist from Harlow Hospital said ‘there’s no point you coming, I’m a neurologist, not a neurosurgeon, you need to be seen at Queen’s or the Cambridge hospital’.”
Giving up on the NHS, she tried to get an answer through her private health insurance. Her scans were reviewed and she received a letter with an opinion that she had not had a brain bleed but an exercise migraine instead. But another referral to another neurosurgeon came and they told her “you have 100 per cent had a brain bleed”.
Doctors made me feel belittled when I posed the question about the jab
Still, no one appears to want to diagnose the cause. And Denise felt “belittled” when asking doctors directly if it was the jab.
“I have been told, ‘oh the amount of people that come in here and think two and two, just because they’ve had the vaccine and something happens to them it’s got to be the vaccine’s fault’,” she said.
“I have been told I am out of the timescale of it happening after the vaccine – which isn’t true according to the Government website. My brain bleed was within 28 days.
“I have been told it’s a different kind of brain bleed that the vaccines cause. But on the [MHRA] Yellow Card reporting site, there was about 155 cases of subarachnoid haemorrhage when I last looked”.
She registered her symptoms with the Yellow Card reporting site in May and claimed a medical exemption from the jabs.
“I have been told that it was probably high blood pressure which I don’t suffer from, haven’t and still don’t and I just haven’t been able to get to the bottom of it,” she said. “If I have asked if it’s the vaccine I just feel belittled by some of the responses I’ve had”.
At 55 and healthy, Denise would not have been in the ‘high risk’ group of potentially suffering severe symptoms from Covid. And like many, felt coerced into getting the vaccine in order to gain back her freedoms.
“I thought I would get my life back,” she said. “I was trying to do my bit and I thought back then, if you had one vaccination, then everything was going to open up again and life would get more back to what it was. That was my reason for having it.”
Knowing what she does now, however, Denise believes the country is simply being frightened by the powers that be.
“They are terrifying people,” she said. “The bit that gets me is the children and trying to vaccinate perfectly healthy kids that literally have no risk of dying from Covid. To give it to them, it’s like that scenario, let’s burn the kids to keep Grandma warm.’
The question for her remains, was the single Covid jab she had responsible for turning her life upside down? She is still waiting for the answer.
*Denise is not the real name of the lady in this story, which is being kept confidential at her request.