Just before Christmas, Stephanie Willette went from being a healthy nursing student to suddenly being a helpless patient paralyzed from the neck down with a tracheotomy so she could breathe.
Today the 20-year-old is slowly recovering in a Kingston rehab hospital, still unable to sit up, but hoping that she’ll eventually walk again.
The Lindsay woman is yet another person stricken with Guillain Barre Syndrome, yet another whose family blames her H1N1 flu shot for triggering the rare neurological condition.
“They can’t prove it, but they can’t disprove it. She was perfectly fine until two weeks after her shot,” says her angry mom Karen. “I think there’s a lot more cases out there than the government’s letting on. It’s a big secret.”
According to the ministry of health, they are investigating just four reported cases of GBS in Ontario following the province’s mass inoculation of five million people.
But we’ve already told the harrowing stories of two patients who blame their debilitating onset of GBS on the swine flu shot — which they received within days of each other at the same Markham doctors’ clinic.
Since then, four more GBS victims have come forward to the Sunday Sun. With the addition of a Hamilton case reported last November, that’s seven Ontario cases by our count alone.
So exactly how many have really been devastated by this highly touted vaccine? And why is Quebec the only province that has a no-fault compensation program for the unlucky few who suffer such a crippling side effect?
