Hope Reborn

Ashley’s Story

“I think the needle touched my bone.”

It was December 2021, and Ashley had just gotten her COVID booster at the Mall of America vaccine clinic when she experienced what she described as an unexpected sensation.

“When the serum was being injected,” she says, “it felt different than any other vaccination I had received before. It felt cold, and I felt it was hitting my bone.”

Ashley mentioned it to the staff at the clinic and they seemed nonplussed. “Yeah, that happens sometimes,” they told her.  Ashley attributed the experience to her small frame and because she had not had issues with her initial two Pfizer shots, she chalked it up as “gross” and tried to push it out of her mind.

“We take COVID very seriously,” Ashley says. To date, she and her husband have never had the virus. They have been very careful. She explicitly trusted the vaccines and vaccine makers. At the time, she was proud that she got her booster to do her part to protect herself, her family, and her community.

So, when she returned to teaching middle school art a couple weeks later in January, she attributed the heart palpitations she began to feel and the memory issues she was experiencing to the fact that she wasn’t used to being in the classroom after staying at home with her toddler son.

Ashley had been a healthy, vibrant young mom with no history of medical issues. In fact, she and her husband had crunched numbers and had decided to forego health insurance in 2022 because they simply weren’t using it. They had determined it would cost less to pay out of pocket than to pay insurance premiums—until her small, infrequent heart palpitations built up over the next four weeks and she knew she needed to find a doctor.

“I was afraid I was having a heart attack,” she says. She was having all the symptoms: left arm pain, jaw pain, left shoulder pain, plus more noticeable “fluttering.”

She found a local clinic and when she met with the health professional there, right away they asked her if she had the booster. Ashley offered to show her vax card.

“I was proud I was contributing to the fight against COVID,” she says but was a little confused about why they were asking. The tests that day didn’t seem to show any problems, but just before Ashley left the office her heart started fluttering again and she asked the nurses to feel her chest. They confirmed that she was experiencing some concerning symptoms.

“I was experiencing premature atrial contractions (PACs),” she says. “They told me it needed to be investigated.”

Then, came the most traumatic and frustrating eight months of her life during which time she was hospitalized two times plus had three emergency room visits. She received diagnoses of super-ventricular tachycardia (SVT), pericarditis, frozen shoulder and costochondritis. She has had chest pains, full-body tingling, jaw pain, nerve pain, numbness, tremors, internal vibrations, weakness, heat intolerance, dizziness among other symptoms which left Ashley feeling confused, frustrated and alone. On top of frightening symptoms in this previously healthy 34-year-old, she was faced with the reality of a medical system whose costs were high but were low on empathy and help.

She racked up nearly $70,000 in medical bills, half of which she had to pay up front while feeling dehumanized by doctors who at times wouldn’t make eye contact with her, wouldn’t touch her, or even take her vitals during appointments that would barely last 20 minutes.

“I felt so unheard,” says Ashley of that time. She left many doctor appointments sobbing because she felt like she had fallen through the cracks of a system that didn’t want to figure out how to help her.

There began to be glimmers of hope along the way. Ashley joined a Facebook group with others who shared similar symptoms and who helped to connect the dots to a possible COVID vaccination injury. In about May of 2022, she saw an article about Team Humanity members at the capitol and was surprised to see other injured people here in the cities. She commented on that post and heard back from Suzanna and formed a connection. 

She used these communities to gird herself with information and resources as well as to feel less alone. What compelled her to find answers and seek compassionate and effective help the most was her desire to fight to live for her son.

A picture of what was going on began to emerge for Ashley. An electrophysiologist she saw told her that her complications were likely from the vaccine. He was seeing heart rhythm disturbances in other patients and in his own staff. Other doctors along the way also agreed that her issues were a listed side effect in the insert of the Pfizer vaccine, but they didn’t have any resources to help. An allergy to the Covid-19 vaccine is now on her medical records and she has been listed as having “post Covid-19 vaccine syndrome.”

She also visited a naturopath who echoed what she was learning about the connection to her booster shot and saw an integrative doctor who was the first to give her hope that she would recover.

“She told me that she didn’t know how to cure me,” Ashley says, “but she told me in time that I would heal.”

By August of 2022, Ashley began to feel some improvement that has since plateaued. She has gone from being extremely limited in activities to being able now to do basic care for herself—with modifications. She still feels the fragility of her heart and chest and carefully considers how much she can accomplish each day.

Ashley hasn’t returned to teaching and doesn’t feel like she will ever be able to resume her career, but she has learned so much about self-advocacy through this last year.

“I never again will have blind trust,” she says. “Knowing about informed consent is powerful. Now I know that I can say ‘No,’ to medical treatments without hesitation.” She also has a new level of understanding of what it means to empathize with others who have also gone through difficult things. She doesn’t second guess people who have had adverse medical experiences. She feels it is important to listen to each other and try to understand various viewpoints.

Throughout 2022, Ashley believed she would die. She had planned her funeral and had written a letter to her son. Now, she is full of hope. Fifteen weeks pregnant, she is confident that her body is beginning to work as it should again. Hope has been a powerful healing tool for her as she has borne witness to her body as it has slowly continued to recover. She knows her heart is still considered “fragile,” but she is encouraged by her new-found wisdom about what to ask from her medical care team.

While she lost a lot of faith in the systems that she considered trustworthy, Ashley has learned an important truth about finding hope in a traumatic medical crisis:

“There are healers everywhere. Though we’re often dismissed by standard western doctors, there’s so much healing from cultures around the world. Integrative physical therapists, massage therapists, Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners, Herbalists, Naturopaths, Homeopaths, those who pray for you, those friends who didn’t stop checking in, nature— they’re all healers and are the ones making a big difference in our lives.”