RFK Jr. The Defender - May 25, 2021


Vax Injured Teen Athlete with Cherie Romney


Episode Stats

Length

25 minutes

Words per Minute

161.74086

Word Count

4,057

Sentence Count

275


Summary

Sherry Romney shares what happened to her son, a 6'9" high school basketball player, after he got the COIDV injection. She also shares the story of her other son, Everest, who was also a star basketball player at her son s high school and has been in the ICU in the hospital for almost a month now. She talks about the process of getting her son to the doctor, and the results of the CT scan, and how her son is doing. She also talks about how she and her family are coping with the loss of a member of her son's basketball team, and what they are doing to make sure her son recovers fully and is able to continue playing basketball in the future. Thank you, Sherry, for sharing your story and for being brave enough to share it with the world. Thank you also, to all the doctors and nurses who have been caring for her son and the other athletes in her family. You are a blessing and a blessing to her family! Please reach out to us with any questions or concerns you may have about her son or Everest. We are always open to suggestions for future episodes. Thanks for listening and supporting this podcast! If you like it, please leave us a rating and review it on Apple Podcasts! Music: Fair Weather Fans by The Baseball Project - "Good Morning America" by Fountains of Wayne State University - "Outro Music: "Sparrothead" by Suneaters "Goodbye" by The Good Morning America - "Thank you for listening to this podcast and Good Luck & Good Luck" by Haley and Good Morning California - "I hope you enjoy this episode! - "The Good Morning Crew" by Kami & I hope you'll come back next week for a new episode of Good Morning Cozy" - "A Good Luck! "Good Luck!" - "Serendor "A Little More" by Shadydave "By Haley and I hope You'll Come Back Soon" by Eddy and I'll See Me & I'll Talk About This Week's New Song "Good Day" by Puff & I Can't Say That Soon - "Prayer" by Sarah's Song "Thank You, Thank You, Sarah & I Love You, I'll Hear Me & Goodnight & I'm Not Sorry by You'll See You Soon (featuring Me & Thank You" by Mr. Eddy "I'll Hear You"


Transcript

00:00:00.000 I'm joined today by Sherry Romney from Draper, Utah, and I wanted to ask you, Sherry, about what's happened to your family following the COVID shots.
00:00:11.000 Thank you.
00:00:12.000 Thank you for having me.
00:00:14.000 Sherry has two superstar basketball players in her family, including her son, Everest, who's 6'8".
00:00:24.000 And prior to getting his COVID vaccine, I think he scored 16 points in his high school basketball.
00:00:33.000 And he's been now in the ICU in the hospital almost since getting the vaccine.
00:00:38.000 Can you tell us what happened?
00:00:40.000 So my son is 6'9".
00:00:42.000 He's a varsity basketball player at Corner Canyon High School.
00:00:46.000 He plays for Utah Premier, and that's his AAU team.
00:00:50.000 He got his COVID shot the same day as I did and my husband did on the 21st of April.
00:00:57.000 He scored he was really sick and even really sick he scored 16 points at his basketball game.
00:01:04.000 Often it can be even more.
00:01:06.000 The very next day we were at the pediatrician's office because he had so much swelling in his neck that he couldn't move his neck without using his hands.
00:01:18.000 My My husband is also very athletic.
00:01:22.000 And I mean, he's six foot nine as well.
00:01:25.000 Plays basketball, but not professionally, obviously.
00:01:30.000 So on the 26th, we took him and my son in.
00:01:35.000 It was five days after the shot.
00:01:37.000 We took him into the pediatrician.
00:01:39.000 He'd had swelling and a lot of pain in his neck.
00:01:43.000 He thinks that night, he started complaining about it on Thursday, the 22nd, but he says that it started kind of feeling sore that very night.
00:01:54.000 He's an athlete, so, you know, little owies kind of don't tend to, he doesn't tend to pay attention, but by the time he got done with his tournament, he could barely move his head.
00:02:07.000 So we took him into the pediatrician, and the pediatrician said it was a pulled muscle, thought it was a pulled muscle.
00:02:12.000 My son disagreed with him.
00:02:14.000 My son knows what a pulled muscle feels like.
00:02:16.000 He said it's not what it is.
00:02:18.000 He felt horrible, achy, just awful.
00:02:22.000 He had a temperature of 101 that day.
00:02:26.000 The pediatrician put a neck brace on him, which actually made it worse, and then sent us home with some antibiotics.
00:02:37.000 I pushed really hard, and he did get a CT scan.
00:02:42.000 But he told me if he had three careers in medicine, three lifetimes, he wouldn't see what I'm suggesting.
00:02:51.000 Because I said, this has to have something to do with the shot.
00:02:55.000 The pain started on the same side of his neck as he got the shot on his right side.
00:02:59.000 And he said, well, we'll report it, but I just don't think it's likely.
00:03:04.000 So it was pretty dismissive.
00:03:06.000 We were sent home.
00:03:08.000 Within 24 hours of that, my son got probably one of the worst migraines he's ever had.
00:03:15.000 And it didn't stop at all.
00:03:17.000 It didn't let up.
00:03:19.000 It didn't matter what medication we threw at it.
00:03:21.000 It didn't any like just regular migraine medication would not touch it.
00:03:26.000 He was basically incapacitated from that point.
00:03:30.000 So we called the doctor.
00:03:32.000 We talked to the doctor.
00:03:34.000 The doctor said, well, yeah, he has a really swollen lymph node next to his jugular.
00:03:38.000 Well, he actually didn't say it was next to his jugular, which he had, because it should have probably been paid a little more close attention to it.
00:03:45.000 But he said, if he's not doing better, then maybe you need to go see an ENT kind of thing.
00:03:51.000 By Monday, my son had had a headache, a migraine nonstop for eight days, and I was done.
00:03:59.000 I had been trying to get him into the emergency room.
00:04:02.000 But my son had been a little resistant because, like I said, he's an athlete.
00:04:06.000 And they're like, it's just an owie.
00:04:08.000 It will go away.
00:04:09.000 So we took him into the emergency room.
00:04:12.000 And they found he had at least two blood clots in his brain.
00:04:19.000 And they transferred my son to Primary Children's Hospital, to the PICU, the PEDS ICU, where he was for almost three days.
00:04:28.000 Then they transferred him to the regular hospital where he was for another five.
00:04:31.000 And he's been released.
00:04:33.000 He's since been released to my care.
00:04:35.000 He's stable.
00:04:36.000 He has two cerebral venous sinus thromboses in his head.
00:04:42.000 And he has, we don't know about long-term damage at this point.
00:04:47.000 Early indications are that he's probably going to be okay long-term.
00:04:52.000 In the meantime, He has to be escorted to the bathroom to get up and in and out of the bathtub whenever he's walking to the table because he's so dizzy and he has some terrible brain swelling from the trauma to his brain.
00:05:07.000 He's 17.
00:05:09.000 So he will be a junior at Corner Canyon High School next year, just turned 17.
00:05:14.000 And how about your husband?
00:05:17.000 My husband...
00:05:20.000 Oh, it's all happened.
00:05:21.000 So much has happened.
00:05:22.000 Saturday morning, just before six, my husband got up in extreme excruciating pain.
00:05:28.000 He's six foot nine.
00:05:29.000 He fainted.
00:05:30.000 Obviously, I'm six and a half months pregnant.
00:05:33.000 My husband's on the floor, cannot breathe, and we have no idea what's going on.
00:05:40.000 I called.
00:05:41.000 I can't move him.
00:05:42.000 He can't move.
00:05:43.000 He got the jab.
00:05:46.000 He did.
00:05:46.000 He got it on the 21st and same day as my son.
00:05:50.000 And he'd been having some pains in his chest and in his, and he thought it was like, he chucked it up to anything, pulled muscle.
00:05:58.000 Like I said, he's athletic, pulled muscle.
00:06:01.000 He did say at one point the pain was so bad, he wondered if maybe he was having a heart attack, but it wasn't up in his shoulder.
00:06:06.000 So he ignored it and he waited and it went away.
00:06:09.000 And it had been happening since about the fifth or sixth day after the shock.
00:06:14.000 But we've been dealing with my son, and my husband had just been kind of ignoring the pains.
00:06:19.000 Well, what happened on Saturday morning was that he had a pulmonary infarction, which means he's lost about a fourth of his left lung permanently.
00:06:28.000 When they got him to the emergency room, they did an x-ray, and they saw that his lungs looked terrible.
00:06:36.000 They since did a CT with contrast.
00:06:40.000 They found he has hundreds, over a hundred, Blood clots in his lungs.
00:06:45.000 So my son had them in his neck and near his jugular and in his head, and my husband has them in his lungs.
00:06:52.000 Which vaccine was it?
00:06:54.000 Well, that's the interesting thing.
00:06:56.000 So my son actually got the Pfizer vaccine, and my husband got the Moderna vaccine.
00:07:01.000 But I've been doing quite a lot of research, and from what I understand, they're the same mechanism.
00:07:05.000 They're different manufacturers, but the same mechanism.
00:07:08.000 So both of them are mRNA drugs.
00:07:10.000 And so they...
00:07:12.000 Interact with your system pretty much the same.
00:07:15.000 It almost doesn't matter who manufactures it.
00:07:19.000 But they did get different vaccines, but on exactly the same day.
00:07:23.000 Have you found a doctor who is actually sympathetic?
00:07:29.000 Let me tell you what.
00:07:31.000 The first seven and a half days at the hospital, the doctors were looking for anything and everything besides the vaccine.
00:07:41.000 They absolutely were hesitant and very, really didn't want to put this together with the vaccine.
00:07:48.000 They were very resistant to that.
00:07:50.000 They looked at the most obscure of illnesses.
00:07:54.000 They tried so hard to put like a, you know, a round peg in a square hole and it wasn't working.
00:08:00.000 And finally on the last day they said, okay, yeah, we think this may have something to do with the vaccine.
00:08:06.000 Finally, like probably a couple hours before we left.
00:08:09.000 It was the first time they actually finally admit it, really.
00:08:12.000 When my husband went in, his physician said he actually refused to do one of the antibody tests that is more indicative of whether or not when my husband got the shot he might already have had COVID. Because we did find out that my son had already been exposed to COVID. What we do know is that thromboses are more common,
00:08:35.000 and we know this just already from how many shots been given, if you get the shot when you have a lot of antibodies to COVID already.
00:08:45.000 In other words, if you had a fairly recent case of COVID. Having said that, my son was tested Every other week, because he's an athlete, so he could play, and it came back negative.
00:08:54.000 So we're trusting these tests that are not very useful to us.
00:08:58.000 We took him in to get the shot because we thought that's what was best for him.
00:09:03.000 We had no idea he had been exposed to COVID. None whatsoever.
00:09:06.000 He had never gotten a positive test.
00:09:07.000 He hadn't gotten sick.
00:09:09.000 Same thing with my husband.
00:09:10.000 When we took them in for the shot, they were not sick.
00:09:13.000 There were no fevers.
00:09:14.000 In fact, I come from a pretty medical family.
00:09:17.000 I've got lots of physicians that are siblings and my dad.
00:09:20.000 I was so careful.
00:09:21.000 I checked their temperatures before we all went in.
00:09:24.000 Like, no one was sick, no sore throats, nothing like that.
00:09:28.000 But the doctor at my husband's hospital said he did think it was highly suspicious that both my husband and my son, following the jab, got blood clots.
00:09:41.000 Are they both in the hospital today?
00:09:43.000 Say that again?
00:09:44.000 Are they both still in the hospital?
00:09:47.000 No.
00:09:48.000 Both of them have now been released.
00:09:50.000 My husband was released last night.
00:09:52.000 They're stable.
00:09:53.000 They're conditioned.
00:09:55.000 My husband's lung loss, tissue loss is permanent.
00:09:59.000 My son's damage to his brain is unknown.
00:10:04.000 We're hopeful that it's all going to be okay.
00:10:07.000 But right now we won't know until those blood clots recede and they can actually look at the rest of his brain.
00:10:12.000 And he's got so much swelling right now that it affects his vision.
00:10:16.000 And they don't really know how much of that will be permanent.
00:10:21.000 So they've both been released to my care and they're just being watched carefully.
00:10:25.000 And then they sleep kind of all day and they just need help getting around a little bit.
00:10:31.000 But they are both home.
00:10:32.000 We're so grateful they're both home.
00:10:34.000 I do want to say that when this all happened, I had an incredibly healthy family.
00:10:43.000 I had a very active family.
00:10:46.000 We're very active.
00:10:47.000 We're big into hiking and outdoor stuff and sports.
00:10:51.000 My husband and my son play basketball every day.
00:10:55.000 My son is what I would consider an elite athlete.
00:11:01.000 It was probably just the most devastating thing to see him going from scoring 16, 18 points in a game to the ICU within a matter of days.
00:11:11.000 The only thing that has carried us has been everybody's prayers.
00:11:17.000 And I felt it, and I just, I mean, or their positive thoughts, and I've needed it because I've had to carry this all alone.
00:11:27.000 And now then with my husband coming down and being in bed and having to recover from these blood clots, it's been, I need everybody's support and I have been very appreciative of it.
00:11:39.000 Was there coverage in the local press or the national press?
00:11:45.000 So there was some, but a lot of it was cut and pasted.
00:11:49.000 You know, people ask me about the vaccine and my perspective on the vaccine and I said, That I thought everyone needed to weigh their own rewards with the potential risk.
00:12:00.000 And that I thought they needed to do what was best.
00:12:03.000 I'm only learning about, and I was always careful about vaccines, but I'm only learning about a lot of the stuff that we didn't know about vaccines.
00:12:11.000 And I feel like we haven't had accurate reporting, it seems like to me.
00:12:16.000 And it's not that I think vaccines aren't good.
00:12:19.000 I do think they're good.
00:12:20.000 I do think that they'll be better if we have more open and accurate reporting and if we can make them even better and safer if we can share this information rather than being fearful of it or hiding it or brushing it under the rug.
00:12:37.000 So I did have some news outlets and I actually had a lot of help from two particular reporters who were wonderful and helped connect me with some doctors who I could maybe Talk to because they had some experience with interviewing other people who had negative side effects and that was very helpful.
00:12:55.000 One of them connected me to a physician who's got some experience with this and he helped guide a little bit some of the testing that was done on my son and that was very helpful.
00:13:06.000 So we have had some coverage of it.
00:13:10.000 It's just it feels like it has been the coverage they're willing to give and as a result not the entire truth if that makes sense.
00:13:18.000 Have you experienced pushback in other areas of your life?
00:13:23.000 Yes.
00:13:25.000 Even my own daughter went to dance and a little girl came up to her and said, your mom says that this has nothing to do with COVID and the COVID shot.
00:13:36.000 And my daughter said, that's not true.
00:13:39.000 It does.
00:13:40.000 And she said, no, you don't know what your mom is saying.
00:13:42.000 You don't, you don't know.
00:13:44.000 And my daughter was like, it's my mom.
00:13:46.000 It's my brother.
00:13:48.000 This was before what happened to my dad.
00:13:50.000 I mean, my husband.
00:13:51.000 I think that there are some people who would be tempted to think I'm a massive anti-vaxxer or to dismiss my message.
00:13:59.000 And it really is just that we have to gather all the information.
00:14:01.000 We may not know enough right now.
00:14:03.000 We may not be distributing it safely right now, especially as they're distributing it to children.
00:14:09.000 The physicians that are going to see the side effects like what happened to my son are not trained.
00:14:14.000 They are not trained to take it seriously.
00:14:16.000 They aren't taking it seriously.
00:14:18.000 They are being dismissive and it's causing further complications.
00:14:22.000 So yes, there has been some backlash, but for the most part, everyone, regardless of the vaccine component, I've had a lot of support, more support than I have had backlash.
00:14:36.000 I've just been surprised at how My words have been taken out of context, especially by people who haven't interviewed me and how I've been summarized without having ever talked to them, things like that.
00:14:49.000 About two weeks ago, the Lancet, which is one of the highest, maybe the highest gravitas medical journal, published the The demographic data on COVID-19 injuries,
00:15:05.000 and what they say is based upon their data sets, that the risk from COVID, the disease, to children between four years old and 17 years old is 1.6 deaths per million.
00:15:23.000 And what I think worries a lot of people We don't advise people to get the vaccine or not to get the vaccine.
00:15:32.000 We try to give people information, that's all.
00:15:35.000 I think one of the things that's really troubling to me is we really don't know how many people like Everest are out there who are getting injured by the vaccine.
00:15:46.000 We have no way of gauging whether the risk from the vaccine is worse than the risk from COVID. The risk from COVID is basically zero to that age group.
00:15:58.000 It's very high to older age groups.
00:16:01.000 In fact, the Lancet article and the BMJ, the British Medical Journal, have said the risk to older cohorts is about 1,200 times the risk to young people.
00:16:13.000 There basically is zero risk to young people.
00:16:16.000 And if the vaccine has any risk at all, then you have to question whether or not You know, we should even be giving it to children the age of at risk.
00:16:27.000 Well, I think that's exactly it.
00:16:29.000 And I agree with you.
00:16:30.000 And that's what I've been...
00:16:31.000 I mean, you've summarized better than I could, I think.
00:16:35.000 What I've been saying is that we have to weigh the risk of the shot.
00:16:40.000 And since...
00:16:41.000 What I will tell you is that the way they categorize my son's side effects are acute lymphadenopathy, which just means swollen lymph nodes.
00:16:50.000 But it was blood clots in his brain.
00:16:54.000 They're calling it a complication.
00:16:56.000 So depending on how it's reported, it isn't even showing how bad the possible side effects of the shot are.
00:17:03.000 So that is concerning to me because I did not know it was such a low risk for him to get COVID. I did it because of what was being told to me and I did it because My son is on an elite traveling team, and he's gone every weekend, and I thought I was doing what was best for him and what was safe.
00:17:23.000 The reality is he'd already been exposed to COVID, and I didn't even know it.
00:17:28.000 My biggest fear is that children probably are the highest ones that are walking around out there Who have been exposed to COVID without us knowing it.
00:17:36.000 And we're giving them the shot and potentially increasing their risk too of the side effects of that shot because we don't know how soon.
00:17:44.000 We don't know if they're presently, if they're in the middle of COVID, but asymptomatic and they're getting the shot.
00:17:50.000 To me, from my perspective and having experienced what I've experienced, it doesn't seem worth the risk.
00:17:55.000 But in the very least, I think every parent should have the right to make that decision.
00:18:02.000 I can't tell you, and I don't know how your audience would feel, but I can't tell you how horrible it is to know that it was my choice and that basically my choice did this to him.
00:18:17.000 And in other words, I had a very healthy, very active, athletic little boy who's right in the middle of recruiting season and now can barely walk.
00:18:29.000 It's devastating.
00:18:30.000 As a parent, we do our very best to make the decisions we make for our children because we think it's what we're doing that's for the best of our child.
00:18:39.000 But if we're not given all the information, how can we be making the right decision?
00:18:44.000 And that's very, I think that's very wrong.
00:18:47.000 And that's very bothersome to me.
00:18:49.000 And that's some of why I've been willing to do these stories because I feel like some of this data was out there, but it was not revealed.
00:18:58.000 Since this happened to you, have you run into friends or neighbors who have also had vaccine reactions?
00:19:05.000 Yes, I have.
00:19:08.000 Even my own husband's family, I've been saying, okay, you guys all need to go get checked for blood clots now if they've gotten it.
00:19:15.000 But there are a lot more extreme reactions than I realized.
00:19:20.000 And so we're talking about how COVID has these lingering side effects.
00:19:24.000 Well, It turns out, because a lot of people have come to me, it turns out so does the shot.
00:19:30.000 There are people who had their shot at the very beginning of April who are still experiencing significant side effects from the shot.
00:19:37.000 And keep in mind that my husband and my son shot, it wasn't their second.
00:19:43.000 It was their first.
00:19:45.000 Everything you're hearing is the second is the worst.
00:19:47.000 My son and my husband will not get another COVID shot.
00:19:50.000 They will not.
00:19:51.000 It's not wise.
00:19:52.000 It's not safe for them, clearly.
00:19:55.000 But there are people who clearly are reacting to the COVID vaccine very negatively, with lingering side effects, and it's not really being reported or talked about.
00:20:06.000 What's your husband's reaction?
00:20:09.000 How is he holding up psychologically?
00:20:13.000 Is he angry?
00:20:18.000 How does he feel about it?
00:20:21.000 That's a preloaded question.
00:20:25.000 It's not angry so much as helpless a little bit you know that and deceived we feel deceived and helpless and he is my husband is amazing he is a rock star he is so strong and my son is too and they are trying really hard to spend time on okay Like in the hospital,
00:20:51.000 my son kept saying to the doctors, he's fought them pretty dang hard.
00:20:56.000 Where he's at right now with regard to his basketball is he's saying, I don't care if the risk is that it might kill me, I'm gonna play basketball.
00:21:04.000 He is that determined.
00:21:07.000 And because of that determination, because of his attitude and his character and my husband's character, we're to the point now where it's just, we wanna look forward.
00:21:19.000 How are we going to heal from this as a family and get back to hopefully as close to the lives we had as before?
00:21:27.000 At the same time, how are we going to help others so they don't have to go through this?
00:21:32.000 And so for all of us as a family, that's probably been the biggest thing is that we've decided we have to talk about it because we didn't know.
00:21:44.000 We didn't know what we were getting into.
00:21:46.000 We didn't know what risk we were taking.
00:21:49.000 And I think it's easier to make a decision and end up being on the side of having had negative reactions if you knew that was even, you know, a likelihood or a possibility.
00:22:00.000 But really went into it thinking, we'll be fine, it's the first shot, not a big deal.
00:22:04.000 I find myself completely at a loss because I'm actually a psychologist and I do all the emotional side on our family, but my husband is a cloud architect.
00:22:14.000 So anything technical he does.
00:22:15.000 So this has been a huge challenge for me because My resource, my number one resource is kind of not available now.
00:22:22.000 And I've had to learn how to, I mean, it sounds funny, but open my own email, like on our main computer, you know, because normally it just comes up on my phone.
00:22:31.000 So I'm trying really hard.
00:22:33.000 And hopefully I'll be a fast learner.
00:22:36.000 But I appreciate your help.
00:22:37.000 Thank you so much.
00:22:39.000 You're an amazing person and you're an amazing mom.
00:22:45.000 And we're going to ask all of our viewers to pray for you and send their prayers to you, Sherry.
00:22:52.000 Robert, can I say I don't feel like an amazing mom.
00:22:57.000 You are an amazing mom.
00:23:01.000 There are literally hundreds of thousands of moms in our community who have been through, you know, of children who are injured because they did what their doctors told them to do.
00:23:13.000 They did what people they trusted told them to do.
00:23:17.000 And that's what we all do.
00:23:19.000 That's how virtually everybody in this community ended up in this community, not because they were anti-vax, just because they were trying to do the best thing for their children based upon...
00:23:31.000 The information they had, and they saw the injuries, and they started educating themselves.
00:23:37.000 And you need to take the experience, and I know you're already doing this, that you've been through, and the pain that you've been through, and the injury that you've suffered, and try to turn that into something really good.
00:23:51.000 I think that's what God wants us to do with our suffering.
00:23:56.000 Thank you.
00:23:56.000 I know that you're doing that.
00:23:58.000 You know, I can tell, I think anybody who sees this can tell the caliber of human being that you are, Sherry.
00:24:05.000 And you're the kind of mother I think everybody who looks at this is going to wish they had.
00:24:13.000 Thank you.
00:24:15.000 Thank you for saying it.
00:24:18.000 Thank you for your time.
00:24:21.000 Well, I want to thank you for joining me, Shree Ramney, and I want to ask all of the people to take a moment today, just take a minute of your time to send your prayers to this amazing family that Everest heals, Preston heals, that you heal, and That you don't carry bad feelings about yourself.
00:24:42.000 You know that you're a good mother and that you did what you knew from the information that you were given was in their best interest at that time.
00:24:54.000 And please, to all of you who listen to this, please send your prayer to this amazing family.
00:25:01.000 Thank you for joining me, Sherry, and thank you for sharing your story with us.