Labor Day Weekend, 2021.
“My period came this morning, and I don’t feel well,” I told my partner.
He grunted.
“I’ll drive us home,” I said.
He cracked a beer.
We spent Sunday afternoon of the holiday weekend with his cousin’s family. They took us out on the lake. My partner waterskied.
“Take some pictures of me while I’m out there.” He handed me his cell phone.
“You sure you don’t want to take a spin?” the cousin asked me.
Thanks, but I’m trying not to bleed out all over your fancy boat here, Mister. Of course, I didn’t say this. I sat on the white leather seat, smiling politely with my knees pressed together, fighting the urge to vomit. “I’ll just swim,” I said.
In my 39 years as a woman, I had never suffered much from PMS; had never bought a pack of Midol. It was a new pain I was experiencing that Sunday, and it was extreme.
We dropped anchor. I slipped into the inky lake and paddled around, hoping the lukewarm water would somehow soothe the unfamiliar sense that a metal rake was dragging through my lower abdomen.
I put in a new tampon before we made the 70-minute drive home that evening. The S on the plastic label was bold, green, and promising. Super!
“It’s weird, but I think I need to change my tampon again,” I said to my partner as I guided the car off the freeway.
“Stop at this gas station. I’ll get more beer.”
“I just put a new one in,” I said. “I’m sure I’ll be fine; we’re almost home.”
We cruised beneath the soft orange highway lights as the last embers of summer burned out on the horizon.
I parked in the garage. We climbed out of the car. Standing in the open door, I felt something on my leg and looked to see two dark red lines running like snakes down the insides of my thighs. My brain didn’t register what I was looking at. I glanced back at the black leather driver’s seat and realized it was awash in soupy liquid. I pressed my palms against my bottom and then examined them, covered in blood.
I called out for my partner.
He walked around the car. “Whoa,” he said, looking from my bloody hands to my legs. I pointed to the driver’s seat. His eyes widened.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” I said, the red snakes crawling toward my ankles.
The first clot fell out of me in the shower, goopy, like a fat red jellyfish. It landed, Splat!, on the stall floor. I bent down for a closer look; it was the size of both my hands splayed next to one another. Tendrils of blood curled around it.
Am I having a miscarriage? The thought occurred to me, but for reasons I’m not going to detail here, I reasoned that was improbable.
My next thought: the shot.
I’d received my second COVID-19 vaccine two weeks prior. The first shot made me feel tired, but the second one landed me in bed, unable to move my arms, neck, and legs for a full day.
It had been two weeks since I received that second vaccine, and I hadn’t had my period yet. Was this my side effect?
I spent the night hemorrhaging. My body wasn’t just bleeding – it was passing multiple massive clots. I lay on a rug on my bathroom floor, freezing and shaking; my body remained in shock between rising tides of pain, which lasted anywhere from 20-30 minutes every time my system prepared to pass another mass.
I called an off-hours nursing number to see if I should go to the emergency room. In that endless COVID era, the emergency room was both scary and sacred; out of fear of contracting COVID and respect for the overworked medical staff, you only went if absolutely necessary.
“Do you think you could be pregnant?” asked the on-call nurse.
I explained why that wasn’t likely. “I think this is because of the vaccine,” I said. “I received the second shot two weeks ago. Have you heard of or seen anything like this?”
The nurse was silent for a pause. “You can take a home pregnancy test tomorrow to make sure you’re not miscarrying. The hormone would still be in your body.”
Her diversion tactic made me feel extra tired. “Like I said, it is highly improbable that I’m pregnant.” The words felt sticky in my dry mouth.
“If you go through more than four ultra-sized maxi pads in two-hours, you should probably come into the emergency room,” said the nurse.
How many maxi pads had I already gone through? I couldn’t remember. I’d lost so much blood. I thanked the woman on the other end of the line, then faded to black before waking to the next round of contractions.
I wasn’t necessarily an anti-vaxxer. I believed in the power of American innovation and was cautiously optimistic when the Feds rushed the vaccine to market via Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. But I wasn’t in any hurry to take it, either. The draconian government and corporate mandates gave me major pause.
The vaccine received authorization for use in December 2020. By then, the world had learned that COVID-19 was survivable for most people without pre-existing health conditions. I was in my late 30s, running long distances, lifting weights, and eating right. I tested positive for COVID-19 in spring 2021, the day after rocking an eight-mile run. Why did I need to take it?
The most significant pressure came from my co-workers – two women who ran the Nashville-based agency I was working for. I flew down there once every other month during the COVID years but worked from home 90% of the time.
“We gotta get you vaxxed, girl.” These women said this to me a significant number of times via the phone or online meetings. I found it weird then, as I do now, that they were at all interested in my decision to take the shot, let alone felt they had the agency to encourage me to make such a significant medical decision. Why did they even care? Why did I even listen to them?
My partner worked in healthcare. He only brought up the issue of me taking the vaccine a handful of times. Most poignantly, before we traveled to his relative’s wedding in Wyoming in the summer of 2021. His elderly relatives would be in attendance. I was scared that I might be the asshole who got everyone sick. “Don’t kill grandma.” That’s what the commercial from the AdCouncil told us.
In July 2021, I took the first vaccine two weeks before we traveled. And to be clear, nobody held a gun to my head. Amidst the chaos, noise, and social pressures of the time, I simply fell in line.
I took the second shot in August.
By Labor Day of 2021, everything changed.
It’s been four years since that first nightmare cycle when my body turned alien, four years of enduring periods with crippling pain and debilitating clotting. Some months, the pain has left me in cold sweats on my bathroom floor (of note: I run marathons; I can live in the hurt locker for long stretches of time). In other months, the sheer amount of blood and uncontrollable fallout (gross, I know) have made it impossible for me to go outside the house or function in an office setting without turning the place into a crime scene (I’ve since moved on from the Nashville job).
I have tried to talk to three doctors about my condition – all of them women. The first two refused to engage; one outright denied any correlation between the COVID-19 vaccine and its impact on women’s reproductive health.
“I thought you might want to know in case anybody is tracking this sort of thing?” I asked.
The doctor laughed.
This doctor did not ask follow-up questions about my condition, did not suggest testing, didn’t even try to explain it away – merely hustled through the exam and sent me on my way.
Another doctor suggested I take birth control and trick my body out of its cycle entirely.
“I think I’m done with pharmaceuticals for now,” I said.
Not long ago, I shared my situation with a third doctor, a general practitioner, at the end of a visit for a different issue. When she asked if there was anything else she could do for me, I off-handedly said, “Well, my period has been a nightmare ever since I took that vaccine, but I’m sure you don’t want to talk about that.”
The doctor placed a hand on my forearm, locked eyes with me, and said the vaccine has affected women’s periods. You’re not imagining this or making it up. You are not alone.
Tears clouded my vision, and I had a good cry in the exam room. The good doctor handed me tissues and encouraged me to release my pent-up emotions. All the months of enduring this weird science experiment gone wrong alone on my bathroom floor, shuddering through contractions in the bathroom stalls of corporate office buildings, hastily wiping up thick globs of blood in tiny bathrooms on airplanes, were suddenly validated. It happened, and I know that I’m not alone. I know other women out there have swallowed their stories because what has happened to our bodies is gross; it’s ugly, and nobody wants to talk about it. Worse, nobody wants to hear about it.
I’ve taken pictures over the years to prove I’m not making this up, even though none of the doctors I spoke to were willing to look. These images are gory and disgusting, but they capture my reality. I’ve debated whether to share the pictures of these horrific blood clots here. I want people to see what that experimental vaccine did to my body and my life. But ultimately, prudence won out. I won’t share them; I shouldn’t have to.
Believe all women … right?
As consumers, we have the fundamental right to ask questions and receive honest answers about the food, pharmaceuticals, beauty products, etc., we consume. Moreover, we have the right to make educated choices on what we put on and into our bodies. Asking questions and demanding freedom of choice doesn’t make anyone an anti-vaxxer or a conspiracy theorist.
Yet, as many of us have suffered our vaccine injuries in silence, it has been daunting to ask questions and damn near impossible to find answers. Meanwhile, brilliant minds like Dr. Peter A. McCullough, Dr. Robert Malone, and Robert Kennedy Jr. have been slandered and discredited as extremists and outright liars (aka “spreaders of misinformation”) for their efforts to expose the truth about COVID-19 and the side effects of these vaccines.
Those colorful signs that people place in their front yards, declaring, “In this house, we believe in science …” have become emblematic of our society’s tendency to only believe in science if it’s a singular directive reinforcing a political ideology: take the shot, don’t ask questions.
That’s not science; it’s indoctrination.
While I don’t worship at the altar of my political ideology, I do believe in the ongoing exploration, experimentation, and testing that fuels science. Which is why I (foolishly) assumed there would be ongoing analysis of the impacts of this vaccine. It is asinine that anyone be labeled a conspiracy theorist for simply asking questions about those impacts. Based on my experience, I have the bloody right to ask these questions:
What impact did the COVID-19 vaccines have on women’s reproductive health?
How many women suffered vaccine injuries? How many of those injuries were related to reproductive health?
Did drug companies and manufacturers know the vaccine might negatively impact women’s reproductive health? To what extent?
Is there any way to reverse these impacts?
Have any studies been funded to understand how the COVID-19 vaccines impacted women’s reproductive health?
Will anyone ever investigate this topic?
Does anyone care?
People can scream all they want that RFK Jr. is an anti-vaxxer and a science denier, but I, for one, am profoundly hopeful that someone as intelligent and dedicated as the late Bobby Kennedy’s son, someone who has already taken on corporate giants like Monsanto and Big Pharma in his career as a lawyer, will be in a leadership role as HHS Secretary (God willing) where his presence might, at the very least, allow space for us everyday folks to seek answers these questions.
In Kennedy’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, which has 4.8 stars and 23,000 five-star reviews on Amazon, Kennedy documents how healthcare professionals worldwide were publishing successful protocols for treating COVID-19 by April and May 2020, as many as nine months before Pfizer and Moderna received FDA approval for their vaccines. If successful protocols existed for treating COVID-19, why was the vaccine mandated? What happened to convince people that they should so fervently peer-pressure their co-workers to take it? (These are rhetorical questions.)
In his book, laden with source citations, Kennedy masterfully unpacks how “Warp Speed devolved into a partnership between the military and the pharmaceutical industry.”
He documents how, in July 2021, the month I took that first shot, a fleet of private jets converged on Sun Valley, Idaho, for the “Summer Camp for Billionaires.” Attendees included the wealthiest men in the world. The guest of honor at this event was CIA Director William Joseph Burns.
I imagine those elitists luxuriating in Sun Valley, taking a sauna, then eating Wagyu tartare by the pool while I sat in the eerily silent waiting room of that hyper-sanitized pharmacy where the person who administered the vaccine took me into a little white room, never made eye contact, and stuck that needle in my arm. Do those elites, the wealthiest men in the world, have this experimental technology flowing through their veins, too? Or did they know more than the rest of us and opt-out? Or was the mRNA vaccine rollout merely one grand experiment that enriched that tiny, wealthy minority, damn the consequences for the paupers of the world. (These are not rhetorical questions.)
In a broader analysis, Kennedy writes, “By that time [July 2021], US billionaires were well on their way to increasing their collective wealth by $3.8 trillion in a single year, while obliterating the American middle class, which permanently lost about the same amount. These tech and media magnates, who had magnified their billions from the lockdown, were the same men who had used their media and social media platforms to censor complaints about the lockdown, even as it filled their coffers past the bursting point.”
As a member of the irrelevant masses, I’ve accepted that we may never understand the extent to which these controversial vaccines have affected our bodies. But a guy like Kennedy, perceivably willing to fight for truth, gives me some hope to cling to the next time I’m sweating it out while passing another clot on my bathroom floor.
Well done, Amanda. Well past time to talk about it!
So heartbreaking! I shall be praying that your new found doctor can help you and others in this predicament. Praying for the complete restoration of your health dear girl.