My Fight For Health After Vaccination

I am in a rather paradoxical situation, in that without modern medicine, I wouldn’t be here. I was born three months premature and it was the facilities of the neonatal intensive care unit that saved me, but for me, medicine took a step too far and sent me on a downward spiral of allopathic damage.

One of my first childhood memories was being taken to the doctor for my pre-school single measles shot at three years old. I remember my mother asking the GP if he was going to do the shot in my arm or my leg. He replied that he would do it in my backside. So he pulled down my trousers, leant me across his desk and jabbed me. I screamed, not from pain as it didn’t hurt that much, but from the shock and indignity of having my clothes removed and being pushed into his desk. I felt as if I’d just been attacked, and couldn’t understand why they had done that to me and it has stayed in my mind ever since.

I developed an ear infection afterwards and from that point on, had problems with repeated infections both in my ears and fungal infections of my feet.

I was taken to hospital, semi-conscious and diagnosed with ‘a Meningitis type illness’, so my mother told me. All I remember is drifting in and out of awareness on a hospital bed, having all sorts of needles and tests, and trying to hit my mother, who ran out of the cubicle in tears.

She, of course, did not make the connection between that and my vaccinations.

Over subsequent years I suffered with continual flu, colds, stomach bugs and earaches until at age 11, I collapsed in a restaurant, unconscious. My vision was affected. I was seeing double. Any movement would cause me to become dizzy and disorientated, and my head hurt badly.

I had three months off school through ill health, having tests at the hospital, most of my time confined to my bed. They never did make a diagnosis, but I developed migraines as a consequence.

At age 13, it was time for my BCG jab so I lined up dutifully with all the other kids. After he’d done the shot, he handed me this blue card, detailing side-effects of the vaccine. I thought, it’s a bit late now. You’ve already given me the shot. Shouldn’t I have been aware of this before?

It struck me as really unethical that I wasn’t given the information until afterwards and sparked off a myriad of thoughts, like, how can they expect people to be healthy if they’re injecting them with germs? On that day I vowed to look into it before I had my own children.

After that jab I was afflicted with more earaches over several months until my ear drums burst. I was totally deaf for two days. So it was off to the doctor again where he confirmed my ear drums were ‘a mass of scars’. That was the start of an 11 year, constant earache that meant I was in pain every day of my life. I stopped listening to music or going to discos, or anything else that teenagers do, because any noise hurt me.

As well as this, I had repeated vaginal infections and a burning pain in my vulva which wouldn’t go away. I lost a lot of my sexual function. It hurt to urinate and getting into a bath was agony. I had to give up horse riding, one of my favourite sports, because contact with the saddle hurt me.

I suffered with this for four years, too ashamed to mention it, until I fell in love and had no choice but to tell.

It took a further two years of visits to GP’s, hospitals and GU clinics before they diagnosed me with Vulvodynia – a chronic neuropathic pain disorder of the vulva. Basically, my nerves were damaged in that area. I was 18 years old, and they told me it was for life. I was not able to have sex at all, unless plastered in steroid cream, and even then, it hurt.

The birth of my first daughter was a blessing, for after each childbirth, the pain became less, until by the time we had our third baby, we were able to have some sort of regular intimacy.

In 2000, after years of consultations, X-rays and hearing tests, they also diagnosed me with hyperacusis, another neuropathic pain disorder, caused by ‘changes in the electrical impulses of my brain’. My tolerance of sound had totally collapsed, to the point where I couldn’t even bear my own child’s voice.

My marriage was put under terrible strain; we weren’t able to socialise and sometimes even watching the TV was impossible. I became depressed and my self-esteem plummeted through the effort of living with constant pain.

My ENT specialist told me the nerves could be re-trained by ‘noise therapy’ – that is, exposing myself to loud noises until I crashed through the pain barrier. I did this – turning the radio up loud, sitting by the vacuum cleaner and going into noisy bars – for a year, in excruciating pain, until one day I woke up and the pain was gone, gone after 11 years! I am still scarred and get earaches easily, but I am finally free of hyperacusis.

I fixed my overall constitution with a wholefood vegan diet and vitamin C supplementation so the once a month flu and colds cleared up, too. I learnt how to stop my migraines with peppermint tea and of course I never got anymore vaccines after the BCG at 13.

My gynaecologist has recently told me that the vulvodynia needn’t be for life and I can re-train my nerves there, too. I use lidocaine anaesthetic to numb myself so the pain response is switched off. After another year or two, I hope that when I stop using it, my nerves will have regenerated normally.

My doctor has told me they have cured people with acupuncture, so that will be my next move. When people talk to me about the dangers of measles, which was once thought of as mild as chickenpox, I think to myself I would rather have a self-limiting infectious disease, than suffer for 18 years with chronic pain and ill health. So when they tell you it’ll only hurt your child for a second, just think, it might end up hurting him for life.

Written by: Joanna E K Jones — Her website is:
http://www.novelbookshop.com