Kirk’s Story – Collateral Damage

UPDATE January 2014 – Please see Kirk’s website – “My name is Kirk. My dad started this web site to help family and friends get to know me a little. I’ve had a difficult go most of my life and continue to struggle daily with seizures. I have been diagnosed with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, which is a devastating epileptic seizure disorder. Please feel free to say hi.”

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Our son Kirk might never be the same. He was by all measures a normal healthy 6 month old that was reaching all his milestones. He was sitting, rolling over, saying da, ma, up, focused on objects and people, in short everything a healthy 6 month old baby should be doing.

Fast forward to more than a year later and he doesn’t say anything, can barely roll over, doesn’t sit unaided, doesn’t focus on any objects or people, rock’s back and forth, has distant vacant eyes and displays autistic tendencies. What could possibly have happened to the bright vibrant active child that was there 1 short year ago?

Well it’s a long painful story. A story of a child that was sacrificed for the betterment of others we’re told. A casualty in the war against childhood disease and the risk in the highly touted “benefits outweigh the risks” equation propagated by virtually every able body in the medical establishment today. In fact Kirk’s damage didn’t take a year to manifest it happened virtually overnight on December 13, 1999, exactly 12 days after his second diphtheria, tetanus, acellular pertussis, haemophilus influenza B, and inactivated polio vaccination at age 6 months.

As the events of the next year unfolded, what is left in retrospect, is the measure of untold pain of watching your helpless child struggle through near death multiple seizures, the beginning of which were mere hours post vaccination.

It was a routine visit to the Webb farm in Wynyard that the story begins. The Hunter family including myself and Sheri with our son Brandyn 2 years, our baby boy Kirklan and two Yorkshire terriers named Felix and Roz. The day was painfully uneventful until 2 mid afternoon, when Kirklan was observed lying on the floor staring and drooling and struggling to respond to our calls of concern.

Immediately assuming the worst, that he had swallowed something, we quickly examined his mouth and throat and packed him up to head to Wynyard hospital. We arrived there and presented Kirklan to a doctor that frankly didn’t know what to do. He examined Kirk and with the encouragement of a Pediatric EMT the decision was made to send him to the Royal University hospital in Saskatoon.

Words can’t describe the anxious pain that enveloped me and my wife…would he make it to the city? – what was wrong? — did he swallow something? — did one of the children hurt him…? One hour of relentless worry, intense prayer and rocking back and forth with my face in my hands…

Midway through the trip, Kirk’s condition improved. His oxygen levels began to rise and he was beginning to respond normally to Mom.

When we arrived at the hospital Kirk was fine. Doctor’s examined him and found all his vitals to be normal and sent us home. All seemed fine yet puzzling. The next day Kirk began what would be the beginning of the rest of his painful life.

Again that evening on the 13th of December, he had begun drooling and staring uncontrollably and yet trying to make eye contact with a look of fear and uncertainty in his eyes. We packed him up and went back to emergency where we spent the first two hours watching him have undiagnosed staring spells. They put him on machines to monitor his breathing and oxygen levels in his blood. As it became clear they were slowly worsening they admitted him to hospital. As the situation became grave the nurse ushered mom and dad into another room where we were told to call family. We called Sheri’s parents during which time we were told to get family down to help us. It was now midnight and no family were in a position to hurry down, but Sheri’s parents agreed to drive an hour and a half in as quick a time as possible.

It had now been a half hour to 45 minutes since we’d seen our son and no one had told us anything. Sheri and I rocked each other in our arms back and forth whispering prayers to God and anyone that would listen when the someone came into the room. “So tell me what happened” he said by way of an introduction. Our response was swift and angry — asking whether our son was alive or not. It was at that moment the man realized that we had been lead to believe our son was dying. He explained our son was ok but that he had had a seizure…many of them to be exact! It wasn’t until he had begun to crash and his oxygen levels dropping that one of the doctors, a neurologist, began to administer numerous IV drugs to stop what he considered now to be multiple seizures. Even though he appeared to be in little relative stress the past three hours, he had indeed been having seizure after seizure without time enough in between for the body to expel the poisonous carbon dioxide. He was out of immediate danger but no one could tell us whether he had gone without oxygen and for how long.

On the 17th prior to discharge from hospital, Kirk again lapsed into intractable multiple seizures. They administered a heavy dose of IV Ativan until the seizures seemed to stop. Hours later we came to realize he hadn’t yet stopped seizing and it took Sheri and I an hour of badgering and belligerence to finally get a resident to contact the neurologist on call only to get the standard “call me when it gets worse” professional response. When it became clear to Sheri and I that our son was heading down the same road as before and the end result just hours away was slow suffocation due to increasing CO2…we demanded the doctor come down and see Kirk. I tried to reason with him and Sheri grabbed the phone away from me and abruptly told him to get his attending ass down to see Kirk! He complied.

When he arrived he quickly assessed him and tried to interrupt his seizures with Ativan and Dilantin, which didn’t seem to work until just before they were advising admitting him to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit and putting him on a ventilator. He began to respond and return, but they decided all would sleep better having him monitored closer and ventilated.

The following days and weeks were a blur. Numerous blood tests and EEG’s, and Kirk more or less vegetative on the intense anticonvulsive drugs that were being pumped into his tiny body to keep it from seizing to death.

Now began the questions. What happened to our son? To the best of our knowledge nothing out of the ordinary precipitated the onset of the event. Racking our brains, Sheri remembered us feeling that something wasn’t quite right a week previously when Kirk had stared vacantly prior to our leaving for our Christmas party and since then she noticed similar stares which she had simply dismissed. The first of these staring episodes appeared within 72 hours of his shot.

In mentioning this to all the attending staff it was quickly dismissed in favor of investigation. They began searching for anything that may have triggered these seizures. Meanwhile Kirk continued to be heavily medicated. He was reacting to the drugs with rashes around his mouth and lips, groin, bum. He had received the parting gift of a cold when leaving the PCIU and was barely coherent. He was placed in a room for quarantine pending standard tests for meningitis and other neurologically altering diseases. During the next weeks he went through several EEG’s, a CAT scan, complete blood and body fluid workup. None proved fruitful. In the beginning their wasn’t even any abnormal brain activity EEG. After a few weeks the continued seizures began to show up as unhealthy brain activity. With temporal spikes indicating random electrical patterns.

I had gone back to work and Sheri had notified her employers at the Royal University Hospital that she would have to take a leave of absence.

In the coming months we became as educated as we could, seeking out numerous experts in their fields, undertaking trips to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Homeopathic clinics in Calgary, Saskatoon and Winnipeg, investigating various on-line resources as well as consulting with Kirk’s numerous doctors here.

Through the Nielsen Homeopathic clinic in Winnipeg/Yorkton we have seen children in similar situations. Many of whom have not yet come to make the connection to vaccines. When Kirk was in hospital in March 2000, a 3 month old boy from Regina was admitted to the bed next to us since Saskatoon has the only two pediatric neurologists in the province. This child had a very similar presentation and timing post vaccination.

When I performed a search of the VAERS database, I uncovered the culprit in reactions similar to my sons is almost always one brand of vaccine. (This is the American vaccine adverse events reporting system)

Days after Kirk’s reaction I searched the web under infantile multiple seizures. At the time one of many hits came up indicating vaccine as a possible cause. I say at the time, because now when you perform a similar search it seems most of the propaganda you get in the first few pages is government pro-vaccine sites.

What have we learned almost 2 years later? Most important — Don’t trust anyone, do your own research!!

1. Get to a good homeopath.
2. Don’t vaccinate your children.
3. If you are too scared to say no, at the minimum resist vaccinations until after your child’s 2nd birthday.
4. Make sure they are healthy immunilogically.
5. Trust your instincts.
6. If seizures present consider using the ketogenic diet as soon as the first few drugs and homeopathy become ineffective.
7. Vaccines routinely injure and are based on arguable science.

Prognosis:

Our Kirk will never enjoy the gifts he was born with. Unaided, Kirk will be diagnosed with a syndrome of our doctors’ choice and will probably be declared autistic. Even with the divine help of Dr. Nielsen and the best of all possible scenarios he will struggle for the next few years trying to catch up. He will continue to endure seizures, physiotherapists, occupational health visits, speech and language pathologists, innumerous visits scheduled and otherwise to the hospitals emergency rooms, neurologists, pediatricians, dietitians and a host of healthcare professionals. We will continue to have to rely on the financial and emotional support of family to help ends meet and the list goes on.

Our lives have been leveled with one foul allopathic swoop.

View the letter the Hunter family wrote to the “Honourable John T. Nilson, Q.C. Minister of Health” in April 2003.