By Christine Townsend
SaneVax, Inc.
At one point or another, every parent in the world makes a decision they regret. Who could have predicted that an attempt to protect my daughter from cervical cancer via HPV vaccination would turn our lives into a constant battle to regain her health and maintain her right to an education? If we had only known……
Allow me to introduce my daughter, Chelsea Sascha Townsend, of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, UK. This is her story.
Before Chelsea had the GlaxoSmithKline Cervarix injection she was a very happy, outgoing, confident young lady who, from starting nursery at the age of two to having the first round of vaccinations at the age of twelve, had had just one day absence from school due to illness. Chelsea was such a determined and confident young girl that, once she started secondary school (making the move with none of her friends from primary as they all had places at a different school) was when others began to notice that she was confident, very intelligent and always stood up for herself, she would go out of her way to prove to them that she was the stronger person. She would come home with tales of being told she was ‘weird’ and her response was, ‘if they want weird, then I’ll give them a reason to call me weird’ and would set off in the mornings with the left side of her hair in a plait and the right side either down, in a bunch, a mass of curls or dead straight. Always pushing boundaries; that was my daughter. She had many friends at primary school and during her first year of secondary would always be out on sleep overs, taking bike rides, reading for hours on end and even began to go to listen to local bands play. Chelsea had the respect of her peers.
After receiving the first injection – my daughter was part of the first year of the HPV vaccination programme being administered (her dates of vaccination were November, December 2008 and May 2009) – Chelsea began to get severe headaches which were treated with migraine medication which then led to her having what she described as ‘absences’ whilst at school: she could be in the middle of a lesson, walking along at break time, sitting down eating lunch or have someone talking to her and yet she couldn’t hear a word that was said to her and felt as if she was ‘not in her head’; she was referred for investigation for possible epilepsy. Naturally, the epilepsy diagnosis was incorrect.
Over the next couple of months and the subsequent doses of ‘Cervarix’ being administered, Chelsea began to suffer from aching joints, more severe headaches and tiredness. She began to miss a couple of days of school a week due to the headaches, nausea, aching joints and by the time she was approaching the end of year eight she was missing whole weeks due to all the previous side effects with the added issue of extreme exhaustion now beginning to affect her. She also was experiencing loss of short term memory, lack of concentration and visual disturbances.
Read more at: http://healthimpactnews.c...
