Medical professionals spend four days trying to stop Campbell River man’s seizures after receviving COVID-19 vaccine

Days after receiving his first dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, a Campbell River man suffered seizures that would not stop and ended up on life support for five days.

The ordeal began when Nelson’s wife, worried about not having received his usual “good morning” text, came home from work on her lunch break to find him on the couch “complaining about the dog bugging me all morning and that I didn’t feel good.”

“Right after I finished that I started slurring my words and then started convulsing on the couch,” Nelson said.

Nelson doesn’t remember any of this. The next thing he does remember is waking up in the ICU in Victoria four days later.

“I don’t remember a single thing. I don’t remember going to bed the night before. I don’t remember getting up in the morning. I don’t remember going to the hospital, just everything was a blur. I don’t remember a single thing till I woke up in the ICU in Victoria four days later,” Nelson said.

He was put into an induced coma and every time they had tried to unsedate him in that period, he started convulsing.

He underwent a series of tests – EEG, MRI, spinal fluid, COVID – and everything came back normal.

After being brought successfully out of the coma, he had burst blood vessels in his arm (from a blood clot in the area of his vaccine), could hardly walk and had a droopy right eye as well as body aches, a pinched nerve in his hip as well as pneumonia and a lung infection from the breathing tube and a bladder infection.

Nelson had received his first dose of the Moderna vaccine on July 26 in Campbell River and was happy to get it.

“I chose to get my first one because I wanted life to try and be as normal as possible again,” Nelson said. “I was just trying to do my part for the community and stop the spread of the virus.”

Nelson describes himself as a healthy, 26-year-old male that runs 4-5 kilometres “almost every day” with his dog and eats healthy, doesn’t smoke or drink.

He’s not opposed to the vaccines or to people who choose not to get one but he just thought it important to share his experience with it.

He and his family mentioned that he had only just received the vaccine days prior to the convulsions but there was no discussion about it. He assumes that’s because the medical professionals were trying to rule out any other possibilities through the various tests.

He says his family doctor told him that they don’t know enough about the shot to say that’s what happened and the neurologist from Victoria General Hospital who treated him through this ordeal did ask him about the vaccine he received and then sent all his information off to specialists to review.

“It just seemed way too coincidental how close it was to the vaccine and the blood clots in the same arm that I received the shot,” Nelson said.

His neurologist, however, “highly recommended I did not get my second vaccine,” Nelson said.

“I don’t want to fearmonger people and like, you know, I’m not here to persuade people to not get the vaccine because I was so inclined to get it as well,” Nelson said. “I don’t feel comfortable getting the second vaccine myself. I don’t know what to do about it because there’s no medical exemptions from what I’ve seen.”

Nelson expressed his thanks for the care he received.

“I like to give a huge thank-you to everyone in Victoria General Hospital in the ICU for saving my life and taking such good care of me and making sure my family was as comfortable as they could be given the scarey situation we were in,” Nelson said. “And another huge thank-you to KDC (Kwakiutal District Council) Health for covering my families’ food, travel and accommodation while I was in hospital.”

Nelson posted about his experience on social and media and said he has had “at least a dozen people contact him personally to talk about their reaction to the vaccine because they either don’t have anyone to relate to or because no one wants to post about it themselves on social media because they just don’t want to hear backlash from other people.”Source