OLD LYME, Connecticut (PNN) - September 16, 2022 - Sheila Bath, a 60-something chef and life coach from Connecticut, first suspected she’d been injured by the single-dose Johnson & Johnson (J&J) COVID-19 vaccine on April 11, 2021 - exactly 14 days after she got the vaccine.

In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Bath said her initial symptoms included a burning sensation running from her legs to her spine and numbness in her feet. The symptoms lasted for two months.

“My legs were burning from my ankle all the way up to my lower spine on both sides. Burning, burning, burning,” Bath said. “My feet were numb. It was burning out the nerves in my legs and in my spine.”

She said she also sustained “terrible bruising” on her extremities, dry mouth, worsening vision, inability to walk, cysts on her kidneys, gallstones in her bladder, calf cramps, muscle spasms, depression, brain fog, and 20 lbs. of water-weight gain.

These are “classical Guillain-Barre Syndrome symptoms,” Bath said.

Bath suspected the vaccine triggered the symptoms, but doctors were initially reluctant to draw the same conclusion.

Bath told The Defender, “I didn’t know what Guillain-Barré was, but it’s a very well-known thing that you have to go directly to the hospital. [My neurologist] could have sent me directly to the hospital. The neurologist neglected to follow the protocol of getting me into hospital when he could have cured it.”

“Three times I went back to him, and he sent me home,” she said, telling her, “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’ve got neuropathy because you’re older.”

When Bath told her doctor the only explanation she could think of was that she’d been vaccinated two-and-a-half weeks ago, “He practically kicked me out of the office,” she said. “Then I called back a third time. I said, my legs are still burning up… can you help me? They refused to see me.”

More than a year after getting the J&J vaccine, Bath began to experience new symptoms, including partial digestive paralysis, which she said “means the COVID-19 spike protein [was] still alive, doing damage,” even though it is “supposed to be a dead virus, we were told.”

Doctors attributed the new symptoms to Crohn’s disease, a type of inflammatory bowel disorder, because Bath had a history of autoimmune disease.

But Bath disagreed with that diagnosis. “I felt like saying, honey, I had Crohn’s when nobody knew Crohn’s, and I had to fight my way through that for 13 years. That is not Crohn’s… that is paralysis from the shot.”

Bath described being “chided and yelled at” by doctors for even suggesting her health troubles were related to the vaccine. According to her, it was not until she visited a naturopathic doctor that she finally received care, attention, and a concrete diagnosis.

She said, “I walked in, he took one look at me, and he said, ‘I know what you got.’ [The] first time I saw him, he says, ‘You’ve got paralysis in your spine and in your legs. Did you take the [Johnson & Johnson vaccine] or what other one?’”

“He said, ‘I’ve got an antidote for that, a homeopathic antidote for peristalsis,’ and sure enough, it worked. Did it work perfectly? No. But what it did do was save my life.”

According to Bath, when she shared the news of this successful treatment with her cardiologist, “She started screaming at me, this nice, gentle woman who isn’t even connected to the vaccine.”

Bath was initially reluctant to get a COVID-19 vaccine, she said, but was required to get it for employment reasons.

She opted to receive the single-dose J&J vaccine because, “I figured, well, one [dose] is better than two.”

Although Bath acknowledged there was information available advising people with autoimmune conditions to avoid the J&J vaccine, she said she was “in remission for 20 years through natural means.”

But she also believes she wouldn’t necessarily have been better off getting the Pfizer or some other COVID-19 vaccine.

“Who knows? If I was pressured into taking the Pfizer [vaccine], maybe I would have been worse off,” Bath said.

Bath also noted that the specific J&J dose she received came from the Baltimore Emergent BioSolutions manufacturing plant that subsequently was shut down after reports of regulatory problems.

The injuries and adverse effects Bath sustained have been debilitating in terms of her ability to work.

Bath told The Defender, “I used to work 10-12 hours a day. I have not been able to work in 16 months. My neurologist also refused disability, [putting] me into poverty.

“My greatest fear is being homeless. I’ve happily worked my whole life, never asked for help. I was crying every day and definitely suicidal.  I haven’t been able to work and [this experience] totally put me into poverty. I’ve been very close to homelessness a few times. I ran through all my money.”

Through this, Bath hopes that she can sensitize the broader public to what is happening.

“We need the public to know this is not political,” Bath said. “Both sides of the aisle have been hurt, and we are in this together.”

She added, “We can’t trust the regulators because they’re all owned by Yale and Harvard and everything else.”