A Campbell River man who suffered seizures that put him on life support for five days is hoping doctors can get to the cause of his ordeal.
It 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.”
“…I started slurring my words and then started convulsing on the couch,” Nelson said. The next thing he remembers is waking up in the ICU in Victoria four days later.
“I don’t remember going to the hospital, just everything was a blur. I don’t remember a single thing…” Nelson said.
He was put into an induced coma and each 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.
Nelson did recieve his first dose of the Moderna vaccine on July 26, just a few days prior to his medical emergency and any connection with the vaccination is being explored.
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 was happy to get his first dose of the vaccine but any connection to it has yet to be proven.
“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 four to five 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.
The medical professionals gave him a series of tests presumably to explore all possibilities, he said.
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 sent all his information off to specialists to review.
His neurologist “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.”
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Devin Nelson ended up in the ICU in Victoria after suffering seizures. Doctors are trying to determine the cause, including whether there is any connection to the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. Photo courtesy Devin Nelson
