Caroline Pover
The following is an excerpt from Caroline Pover’s new book Covid Vaccine Adverse Reaction Survival Guide (Chelsea Green Publishing September 2023) and is printed with permission from the publisher.
Illness has a tendency to challenge the connections we have with the world outside our brains and bodies. Even something as simple as a cold can affect our interactions with friends, family, and colleagues. It might impact our relationships with social media, exercise, or time spent outdoors. It might affect our ability to do all the things that usually make us feel joyfully connected to the universe. We know this happens because we have felt ill before. We know we have to be patient. We know we will get over it. Feeling disconnected from everything about our normal lives is something most of us are able to cope with, for a few days.
Unlike a cold, illness from a vaccine injury lasts much longer than just a few days. If you’re reading this book then you’ve probably already been dealing with it for a few months. Some of us have been living with it for a year and it’s still ongoing. That’s a long time to have your connections with the world disrupted. And because of the nature of this particular illness, there is another level of disruption to the connections that formed part of our lives before all this. The fact that our condition is related to a vaccine means that some of our connections aren’t quite as full of empathy or compassion as we might have expected. And we may be surprised to find ourselves connected with new people specifically because we’ve had a vaccine. Not all of those connections are helpful, and some are even harmful.
The Vaccine Deniers
Scientists and researchers acknowledge that each one of us is complex, different, and unique in our physical, psychological, and emotional makeup. That’s why part of the clinical trial stage for any medicine includes testing on a wide variety of people and specifically for the purpose of looking at adverse reactions. There may well be a lack of clarity around the number of adverse reactions, but the people who actually work in vaccine development do not claim adverse reactions are nonexistent. Yet we seem to regularly meet other people in our everyday lives who flatly deny that adverse reactions exist. And they can’t wait to give us their opinions about people who say they are experiencing adverse reactions.
There are people out there who absolutely do not believe the vaccine is responsible for our health problems. You will come across them on the mainstream media, on your social media, during your medical appointments, and among your friends and family. Most of the ones you meet in person will at least be sensitive enough not to voice their denial (not to your face anyway), but you will meet with people who come up with all sorts of reasons to explain your ongoing health problems. They will propose any excuse except the vaccine itself.
If you feel you must respond to vaccine deniers, then you can quote some statistics from the vaccine manufacturers themselves; for example, “AstraZeneca state that very rare reactions occur in 1 in 10,000 people. Out of 52 million vaccinated people in the UK that’s 5,200 experiencing adverse reactions. I guess I’m one of them.” Then shrug it off like it’s no big deal and move on. Don’t waste your energy.
How to deal with vaccine deniers? Don’t. It is not your responsibility to persuade anybody to believe you. People who do not believe you are never going to be part of your recovery, and your recovery is your utmost priority right now. Vaccine deniers have no place in it. Whether they are a medical professional or a member of your family, move on from them. I have developed a personal rule: I do not discuss my health with any medical professional before ascertaining whether they are a vaccine denier or not. It’s a waste of time for both of us. If it’s someone close to me, then I either avoid the topic altogether, or accept that this is one of those times in life where I have a “relationship reshuffle,” and someone that was once very important to me may not have a role to play in my healing. It’s very difficult and there is some grieving involved. And the distance that grows between you because of this might be necessary for now, but it doesn’t have to be forever.
The Vaccine Silencers
These are the people who do not deny that adverse reactions to vaccines exist, but are extremely uncomfortable with you talking about them. They say things like, “Yes, but we had to get back to normal somehow,” or “Yes, but think of all the lives it’s saved,” or “Yes, but it’s very rare,” or, my personal favourite, “Yes, but if you talk about it you might put other people off having their jabs.”
Vaccine silencers are much harder to deal with than vaccine deniers because the former are sending the message that the damage to your life is a sacrifice for the greater good. Somehow your pain is necessary. The fact that we’re left in the lurch to deal with that physical and emotional pain doesn’t seem to register with them.
They don’t want you to tell them about your experience because it makes them afraid: afraid of what might be happening inside their own bodies, afraid of having their next jab, afraid that health professionals don’t know what they’re doing, afraid that the government or the media isn’t sharing the whole truth, afraid of how we are going to move on with Covid, afraid of not having control of their lives. The vaccine-injured make vaccine silencers afraid.
People become defensive when they’re afraid. They need reassurance that their experience, opinion, and world view is right, so that they can feel safe again. Vaccine silencers might be happy to talk about adverse reactions with you, but only for the purpose of convincing you to agree with them. They will ask you questions for the purpose of arguing, not for the purpose of learning. They are far more exhausting than vaccine deniers.
How to deal with vaccine silencers? Set your terms of engagement. State your boundaries, and stick to them. Identify on what terms you feel comfortable communicating with them, but know that you don’t need to communicate with them at all if you don’t want to. Again, you don’t owe them any explanations.
My favourite way of dealing with them is to say, “I am willing to answer your questions, but for me this is a deeply traumatic experience that I am still living with, so I am not willing to argue with you.” If all they want to do is argue and you make it clear that you will not participate in an argument, then they will lose interest in the conversation. But there is a chance that they will be happy to continue, and to learn a kinder way of communicating with someone who is vaccine-injured.
The “Vacurious”
I can’t claim to have invented this fantastic word — my new friend Charlet (also vaccine injured) invented “vacurious” to describe people who have never had a Covid vaccine, have no intention of having one, but are obsessed with what the lives of vaccine-injured people are like. I would say that you will find these people online, but it would be more accurate to say that they will find you online.
Vacurious people are more exhausting than the vaccine deniers and vaccine silencers combined. If it is someone within your existing network, and they have just found out about your adverse reaction, they will think nothing of immediately contacting you to find out all the details about your vaccine injury, despite never having spoken to you in years (if at all). They have no comprehension of just how draining it might be for you to again go over everything that happened.
How to deal with the vacurious? Don’t answer their calls, keep your texts or emails very short, and direct them to any social media or blog posts you may have made that explain what happened to you. The voyeuristic nature of the vacurious isn’t going to be helpful in your recovery.
The Vaccine-Victim Saviour
These are the people who claim to be able to fix us. They present themselves as having all the answers — and such clear, simple ones — that they say they are using to treat “many” vaccine-injured people. Where all those magically recovered vaccine-injured people are isn’t quite so clear, but the vaccine-victim saviors always have a website that bangs on about their miraculous cures and how you can purchase them. They portray themselves as the gatekeepers to those miracle cures and do an incredibly effective job of convincing us that we should be following their guidance. They join our support groups, where they constantly post links until an admin works out that they’re not vaccine-injured themselves and boots them out.
How to deal with vaccine-victim saviours? Accept that you are vulnerable right now, and that makes you prone to believe people who seem to be offering you hope. Nobody has any miracle cures for us. Nobody has any answers yet. If there were a miracle cure, then we would be talking about it among ourselves. It would be the only topic of conversation in our online support groups. There is no simple answer from any one individual that will make this all go away. Healing is a complicated, multi-layered process and nobody — however well intentioned— can “save” us. This vaccine-victim saviour complex is more about them than it is about us.
Dealing with Vaccine-Related Connections
Interactions with any of the aforementioned groups have the potential to trigger both physically and emotionally, and often very unexpectedly. We are incredibly sensitive right now and any negative interactions can set us back days in our recovery, if not longer. But we can minimize the impact of unsympathetic or unkind interactions by being prepared and having ways of dealing with them at our fingertips. Remember the letter B when dealing with these connections. The first B involves you sensing that the connection you have with that person feels a bit off. Are you thinking, “This is bullshit,” as you deal with them? If so, then you have the 3Bs to work with. You can:
- simply block them (in non-online terms, walk away).
- set a boundary before you’re willing to continue communicating.
- have a comeback at the ready.
Remember: Is this bullshit? How shall I respond? Block/boundary/comeback.
Let’s talk about the other connections we have — those that are not necessarily related to vaccine injury but may play a helpful role in our healing from it.
Connection with Nature
So much about Covid (isolating and lockdowns are the obvious examples) has damaged our connection with nature. And if we’re dealing with fatigue or paranoia as part of our adverse reaction, then that can also have a huge impact on our desire or ability to be outside. We all know that being surrounded by nature is good for us, and we need to make that a part of our ongoing healing, in whatever way we feel able. It might require significant effort. From spending time every single day on a beach or in a forest, wooded area, or garden, to just listening to a recording of a waterfall, and all the things in between, we need to spend time outside of our own thoughts and focused on something beautiful in nature, ideally while actually being out in it and breathing in fresh air.
Connections with Our Five Senses
Focusing on what we can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch is a common technique for dealing with anxiety, and something you may already be doing as part of managing the mental health impact of the vaccine on your life. This is something that we can all spend some time doing, every single day, perhaps multiple times a day if we feel we need to. We don’t need to be anywhere specific and we don’t need any special equipment. The connections with things outside my own head were vital in the early months of my recovery and, because the confidence I have in my own ability to cope with my situation ebbs and flows sometimes, I know that I would do well to employ this technique more often.
Connection with Our Sixth Sense
Our sixth sense — intuition or perception — can be our best friend or our worst enemy. It may become our worst enemy after an adverse reaction if, as for many of us, our sense of trust in the world has been fundamentally shattered because of this experience. We have discovered things about the world that mean we no longer trust a lot of what we trusted before. We may now be asking ourselves a lot of questions: Do we still trust our healthcare system? The doctors who work within it? The nurse who put the needle in my arm? The person who called to remind me to get a booster? Do we trust coroners? Do we really still “trust the science”? Do we trust our governments? Our police? The media? Many of us now find ourselves in a situation where we really don’t know who or what to trust anymore. Add to that our bodies’ ever-changing, unpredictable symptoms, and we don’t know whether we can trust ourselves either — certainly not on a physical level.
All of the above affects our ability to trust, and this includes the trust we have in our psychological, emotional, and spiritual selves, which form a huge part of our intuition. And that intuition affects every other topic covered in this book: sleep, food, symptoms, stress, and consultants. Many of us find that our “sixth sense” is keeping us awake at night or has us worried about what food to eat. It can be on high alert either as a symptom in itself or as a contributing factor that slows down our recovery. Our sixth sense is anticipating every situation as potentially stressful, and second-guessing every interaction we have with consultants. Our sixth sense, or our intuition, is not helping us. It has, indeed, become our worst enemy.
Anyone who has ever been in an abusive relationship knows how that experience profoundly affects your intuition and general trust in the world. You lose faith in your own ability to judge whether someone is safe or not. You don’t necessarily know what is a red flag and what isn’t, so you go about your life fearful of making mistakes.
Disconnecting from your intuition can be liberating. Reconnecting with your other senses can help you focus on the here and now. You can reconnect with your sixth sense later, when you feel the world is more deserving of your trust.
Connections with the Media
Of all the connections we’ve begun to question through this experience, the media is probably the one we’re questioning most. All the different kinds of media seem to have a role within our recovery, so it’s important for us to be comfortable with and purposeful about the connections we make with the media. We cannot passively absorb all the media we are exposed to because they have such massive potential to cause more damage to our health. We have to work out ways to protect ourselves from that. Because we know that the vast majority of media has its own agenda, we must establish boundaries.
Connections with Support Groups
There are support groups on all social media, but they will be difficult to find on any censored social media, and they change all the time because they regularly get shut down by the platforms they are on. They may have names that don’t spell out “Covid vaccine” or “adverse reaction,” so it might not be obvious on first glance what they are. But keep looking. There are plenty of them and you will find lots of people dealing with the exact same challenges that you have.
There are usually quite strict rules for joining these support groups, and the admins work very hard to try to ensure that only actual vaccine-injured people get in (the vacurious and vaccine vampires love these groups), so sometimes applicants are misjudged. If your application to join inadvertently gets denied, just drop the admins a private message. Some groups will only allow you in with an invitation from an existing member. Most groups have a “reserve” group ready in case the origin alone gets shut down, so make sure you join that one too. And it’s always a good idea to connect with a few active group members outside of the group so that you don’t suddenly lose that feeling of connection provided by these support groups. They have quite literally been a lifeline for some people during their darkest hours.
A word of warning about support groups (and this is more about the time you spend on them than the nature of the groups themselves): it can be very, very easy to get drawn into constantly checking, commenting, or posting within the support groups. Set a limit to how many you join if that helps you manage your time better, and keep a strict eye on whether being in that group is helping or harming you.
Connections with Other Vaccine-Injured People
I’ve noticed that there are three kinds of people who are dealing with vaccine injuries, and you may recognise yourself here — maybe you’ve been all three of them at one point or another, depending on your stage of recovery. It is likely that you will connect with all three types.
First, there are people who seem to be stuck in that “panic” stage we were all at during the very early days when we started having an adverse reaction. These connections are a little tricky to manage — if you are further along the road to recovery, then of course you want to help, but you need to protect yourself a little too. You are still recovering, and not fully recovered yet.
Second, there are vaccine-injured people who are very, very angry. Understandably so. Again, we have all been there, but spending too much time in anger or around someone who is angry is also not helpful for your recovery. You need to protect yourself a little when dealing with these people too.
But then there are some people out there who have handled their vaccine injury in a way that makes them a total inspiration. They are still recovering, but somehow finding the ability to share everything they are learning with others, to head up support groups, to speak out in a kind way to anyone who will listen, and to try their very best to smile through it all. These are the people you want to make your role models. Watch what they are doing — not what supplements they are taking or what diagnosis they have or don’t have — watch how they are handling the entire experience. They will give you so much hope.
Connections with Yourself
An adverse reaction to the Covid vaccine, in the middle of the global culture we are now living in, is a deeply, deeply distressing experience that disconnects us from everything that defined our world before this happened. Not only can it disconnect us from the world around us, but it can completely disconnect us from our sense of self. We may find ourselves asking all sorts of big and overwhelming questions, not just about our health and how we will be able to function again, but about our world and how it will be able to function again.
But more specifically, we may be asking ourselves, how will we be able to function again within this changed world?
How will we be able to function in a world that is so divided on the topic that we find ourselves right in the middle of? How do we navigate our way through this world feeling that it is not a safe place for us to tell our truth?
I believe that we have to create that safe space ourselves. We have to create the world as we want it to be. We have to be that person we want to speak to ourselves. We have to change the language that we use to communicate with people who may not see the world as we do simply because they have experienced it differently. It doesn’t matter if they aren’t extending us the same courtesy — we are capable of creating the world we want to be in.
We have to create a bubble of safety around ourselves so that we feel able to speak our truth with a smile, set boundaries with firm kindness, meet an angry response with calmness, and understand that fear comes in many forms. We have to make a conscious decision to contribute to the world as we wish it was. We have to be the love and compassion that we wish we had received. We must surround ourselves with it.
That way we can be confident that the world will always be a safe space for us.
Published October 21, 2023
About the Author
Caroline Pover is an award-winning author, speaker, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. She was diagnosed with an adverse reaction to the Covid vaccine she received on March 3rd, 2021. Caroline has become a voice for the vaccine-injured and is known for her compassion and empathy for all parties involved in the Covid vaccine debate. Caroline released this guide exactly one year after receiving the vaccine for those who want to take their healing – in all its forms – into their own hands.
Visit www.carolinepover.com for more information.