A super-fit triathlete says her life was ‘torn away’ after she suffered serious heart damage just weeks after receiving a Covid vaccine.
Ingi Doyle, 56, mother of two, was told there was a one in 10 chance she would survive surgery due to one of a number of medical complications following her second injection of the Pfizer Covid vaccine.
Ms Doyle said she had “no health issues at all” before receiving two vaccinations in mid-2021 and was the picture of health and fitness.
She won medals in triathlons, competed in Ironwoman and half marathon events, and trained 15 hours a week in addition to her job as a fitness instructor.
“My life has revolved around sport and being extremely active,” she told Daily Mail Australia.
‘I was very healthy, very strong’.
Mrs Doyle, who emigrated to Australia from Sweden in 1989, had the Covid vaccination to protect her elderly parents.
“I wasn’t anti-vaccine. I had no reason to be, but I’ve never had a flu shot in my life, I’ve never been sick, always healthy,” she said.
Queensland mother of two Ingi Doyle (pictured) was left fatigued and in pain after two major surgeries, including a procedure to replace an infected arterial skin graft in July this year.
Mrs Doyle (left) said she doesn’t know how she would have survived the series of devastating diagnoses if it hadn’t been for her partner Scott Elms (right).
‘But because my family lived in Sweden and my mother and father were getting old and sick, I thought, “Oh, well, that’s what I’m going to do.”‘
Ms Doyle had a sore arm after the first jab, but her second jab, on 4 July 2021, ‘turned everything around’. The jab has been flagged as a suspected adverse event by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).
Mrs Doyle said: ‘Literally the next day I woke up with a huge swelling under my armpit. It looked like a little water balloon that had collapsed under my ribs.’
Ms Doyle said she felt tired for the next two weeks. ‘Just walking around started to become difficult and I didn’t know why,’ she said.
‘Then I got a very, very sudden, very intense, sharp pain in my lower abdomen. It radiated to my lower back.’
Mrs Doyle (pictured in hospital) was told she had suffered an aortic dissection – a large tear in the lining of the aorta on the inside of the heart
The situation worsened over the next few hours until her partner, Scott, took Mrs Doyle to hospital.
After a series of tests, Mrs Doyle was told she had suffered an aortic dissection – a large tear in the inner lining of the heart.
“I was really scared, I was alone,” she said, adding that her partner was not allowed into the hospital due to Covid restrictions.
“I was in pain and thought I was going to die here,” she recalls.
They also found [I had] an enlarged heart but no answers as to why. I have had many scans and tests and was given many medications. After five days I collapsed, I was a wreck.’
It was just the beginning of a nightmarish series of medical complications and surgeries, including a gruelling 12-hour heart procedure that left her organs failing and her having to be fed through a tube for two weeks.
“I was conscious at times and was put on heavy medication that made me hallucinate horribly,” she said.
‘I was so scared. I was in pain and I thought I was going to die again.’
She later developed a hematoma (a pool of clotted blood), a pulmonary embolism (a clot blocking her right lung), and an infected skin graft that required more major surgery.
Before receiving her second Pfizer Covid jab in July 2021, Ms Doyle (pictured) competed in age-group triathlons on the Sunshine Coast and described herself as ‘really active’
During Mrs. Doyle’s operations, her breastbone was broken open from her sternum to her pubic bone
When Mrs Doyle’s health problems began, she and her partner Scott Elms, 53, desperately tried to find the cause.
“Scott wrote a huge list and at the very bottom it said, ‘Could it be the vaccines?’” Doyle said.
“Doctors said that couldn’t be right because the vaccine is injected into your arm, stays there for three days and then disappears.”
Unconvinced, Mr Elms contacted renowned immunology professor Nikolai Petrovsky of Flinders University in South Australia.
She said Professor Petrovsky gave Scott a “very clear description” that her injury could have been caused by the vaccine spike proteins being found in the bloodstream.
“He sent a number of links to other similar cases that he had seen,” she said. (Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Professor Petrovsky for comment.)
Mrs Doyle said no one had offered the couple an alternative theory.
“They looked everywhere, everywhere, for possible causes, but they found nothing,” she said.
‘The only thing they haven’t looked at properly yet is the vaccine.
‘I think the biggest problem we have in Australia is that there is no testing facility for spike proteins. Where do we get things tested?’
The vascular surgeon who performed her first operation reported Mrs Doyle to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) as a suspected adverse reaction to the vaccine.
Her reactions to the vaccine were recorded as aortic dissection and fibromuscular dysplasia under case number 659726 in the TGA database.
Mrs Doyle’s reactions to the vaccine are recorded on the TGA’s database (see photo)
Mrs Doyle (pictured right with Mr Elms) said she feels like her old life has been ‘taken away’
Despite the TGA’s claims that it is ‘closely monitoring reports of potential side effects from the Covid-19 vaccines’, Ms Doyle said she has only received one call from someone checking her details.
She holds the Health Ministers and the TGA responsible for what happened to her and others.
“Their only job is to make sure that whatever they push on people, give us and recommend to us is ‘safe and effective.’ That’s their job and they’ve failed,” she said.
‘I will never forgive them for what they did.
‘Heart problems are not like a broken arm that heals in six weeks. We suffer from this our whole lives and it is not only the injured person who suffers.’
The TGA told Daily Mail Australia that Ms Doyle had not been contacted because those who report ‘are not routinely contacted or given feedback about their adverse event report other than through the acknowledgement letter’.
However, in some cases, adverse event reporters will be contacted if further information is needed to complete or assess the adverse event report,” a spokesperson said.
The TGA said it used ‘a wide range of methods to identify potential safety signals’.
‘If the TGA’s investigation confirms that there is a safety issue potentially associated with a vaccine, regulatory action will be taken immediately, including communicating the issue to healthcare professionals and consumers,’ the TGA said.
Mrs Doyle says she wakes up every day with pressure on her chest.
“I have random stitches in the middle, on the left side, in my neck and in my arm,” she said.
“They can’t find one of my ovaries, they can’t see it because there’s too much junk inside me.”
Her kidneys are only functioning at 35 percent.
“That means I get tired quickly and my blood pressure is unstable,” she said.
‘I feel like I’m a walking time bomb and I live with a lot of uncertainty.
‘Once you’ve had a heart problem, every little sign or symptom can put you on edge. You never know when the next blow will come.
‘You can never really move on with things, it’s like your life is being taken away.’
Ms Doyle said the trauma of the last few years had also changed her character. ‘I am not who I was and I will never be who I was,’ she said.
My partner sometimes says, “You used to be so carefree.”
‘I’m still a happy and cheerful person, but it’s like something inside me has died and I’ll never get it back.
‘Sadly, my life as I once knew it is over.
“I mourn my old self every day, because I know it will never be the same again.”