Shaun’s Recovery from VITT

On April 22nd, my brother Shaun rolled up his sleeve to do the right thing. He got the first shot available to him, which was the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine.

On May 3rd, he started having abdominal pain and spoke with his doctor and 811 HealthLink BC. He went for a Covid test (negative) & was advised to recover at home.

On May 8th, he went to the hospital and ended up in emergency surgery at 3:00am to remove over 6 feet of small intestine. A second surgery two days later was needed to remove an additional 10 cm of small intestine. He had blood clots in his liver, spleen, abdomen and lungs.

Shaun was diagnosed with Vaccine-Induced Immune Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia (VITT), a very rare but aggressive and potentially fatal blood clotting disorder. That same week, the BC Government announced AstraZeneca would no longer be offered as a 1st dose option.

He was in hospital for 8 weeks, and Shaun’s cells appear to still be producing the antibodies that lower platelets. While other families are beginning to get ‘back to normal’ under BC’s Restart plan, Shaun remains on high levels of medication, with a long road ahead. He is on heavy doses of the steriod Prednisone, that acts as an immunosuppressent, but has a lot of side effects and he has to endure, and take more medications to manage. At some future point, when he’s healed enough for the surgery, he’ll have surgery to reconnect his colon. His whole family remains grateful for the excellent care Shaun received first at LMH and now at SMH.

Shaun’s a healthy & active 43-year old father of two awesome kids. We want to see him get better soon! While his healthcare team works on that, we are trying to relieve some of the financial burdens Shaun & Tara may face, so they can put all their efforts into recovery and healing during this trying time. 

Thank you to everyone who has been following Shaun’s updates on Facebook & for sharing all your kind words. I’ll be sure to post updates here as well.