Dean
Dean imagined his late 50's being very different. He had planned on spending more time away with his wife Alison, or on the golf course with friends.
​
He took the vaccine to enjoy a holiday in Spain with friends, but mid-way through he wasn’t feeling right. His vision was off, he felt a strange pressure on his head and developed tinnitus. He flew straight back and went from the airport to A&E fearing he’d had a stroke.
Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with him, but his symptoms kept piling up. He developed a headache that was unlike any headache he’d ever had, severe neck pain, fizzing in his legs, vertigo…every week there seemed to be a new issue doctors couldn’t explain.
​
Dean then saw a vertigo specialist who told him that what he had definitely wasn’t normal vertigo. In an “off the record” conversation, a link was made to the vaccine, and things started to make sense. Dean realised that given the cause of his illness he wasn’t going to get help from the NHS. He has now spent a small fortune seeing private specialists with very limited success.
​
“What we have is not something our mums and dads had, it’s totally new. We’re not in their text books so there’s nothing they can do. All I can do is be as healthy as I can, go to the gym and eat well to hope my body can beat this.”
​
Alison is devastated by what the vaccine has done to Dean and struggles to do and say the right thing: should she reassure him that his irregular heart beat is fine, or drive him to hospital? She finds it hard to sleep unless her hand is on his heart so she knows it’s still beating.
Dean is still in constant pain, and the fear of what that means for him and his family is constantly with him. He tries to hide this from his family to avoid frightening them or being a burden.
​
“I want to spend my life with my wife, my children and my grandchildren. How I planned. But I say my 3 year old grandson has never known the real me. I can not live with the physical pain.”
​
Dean is angry that the future he planned no longer looks possible. And not because he but did something silly, because he did "what he was told was the right thing".
