Maple Ridge mother part of lawsuit in fight against vaccine passports

A Maple Ridge mother of two, who has been chronically ill for the past 21 years, was hoping her medical conditions would enable her to receive an exemption from needing a vaccine passport.

Now Leigh Eliason feels the provincial government has put people with legitimate medical concerns in the same box as those who are against vaccines, and she has joined a lawsuit aimed at fighting the B.C. vaccine passport system.

Eliason lists a variety of ailments she has suffered including: atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm that can lead to blood clots in the heart; a neuro-vestibular disease which causes dizziness and vertigo; medullary sponge kidney disease, a congenital disorder where small cysts form on the tubes within the kidney or the collecting ducts; interstitial cystitis, a chronic condition causing bladder pressure, bladder pain and sometimes pelvic pain; Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an autoimmune disorder involving chronic inflammation of the thyroid; and Wenckebach syndrome, a problem with the heart’s electrical system where the signal becomes gradually slower and the heart eventually skips a beat.

She estimates she has had at least 100 kidney stones during the past two decades, accompanied by chronic pain in her bladder, and three cardiac ablations for Wenckebach syndrome, a procedure where tissue is scarred in the heart to block abnormal electrical signals.

The neuro-vestibular disease caused her to be dizzy all the time and caused her brain to stop processing information properly.

Eliason explained it made her feel like she was always walking on marshmallows, lights were too bright, and sounds were always too loud.

It took her a year-and-a-half to finally see a top specialist in Vancouver where she was told there was nothing they could do.

“At that point I had been bedridden for close to two years. I couldn’t do anything. At times I could barely open my eyes because everything was being transmitted to my brain in a very weird way. It was really awful and scary,” said the 41-year-old.

“I was afraid I couldn’t live anymore. If they couldn’t fix me I didn’t want to live anymore like that. It was really, really bad,” she added.

In 2018, Eliason found a clinic in California that specialized in complicated medical disorders. She paid $13,000 out of pocket, travelled to the centre where doctors put her on a treatment plan that included virtual reality to retrain her brain.

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“These people saved my life,” she said, adding that although she will never be 100 per cent better, she is now experiencing a fraction of the symptoms that she used to have.

It took until the end of 2019 before she felt well enough that she was able to live her life again with some sense of normalcy.

So, when it came to getting the COVID-19 vaccine, Eliason was hesitant, because “I always seem to be the person that has the rare something happen.”

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When she heard, through her online community support groups, about people with disorders like hers experiencing retriggering events and relapsing with the vaccine, she decided she wanted to sit this one out for a while.

“This isn’t an easy decision for me as it is, because I’m not an anti-vaxxer, I’m not an anti-masker. Everybody in my family has received every vaccination on schedule,” remarked Eliason.

However, she believes she should have the right to weigh the pros and cons of the COVID-19 vaccine for herself. She consulted with her family doctor, who agreed with her decision not to get the COVID-19 vaccine just yet and wrote her an exemption letter.

So far, there are no exemptions allowed for the provincial vaccine passport and there is no information on the province’s website regarding medical exemptions.

Eliason is one of 20 plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against the provincial government. It’s organized by a right-wing media group that is trying to raise $1.5 million for the cause.

She is hoping the province will take a better approach to the vaccine passport system.

“Being somebody chronically ill, I’ve lived a life of social distancing as long as I can remember,” she said.

Eliason doesn’t plan on hitting the restaurants or bars anytime soon. But she would like to see her father, who is a quadriplegic living in a care home in Vancouver. And, as of Oct. 12, that’s no longer possible without the passport.

Never in a million years did Eliason think the government would not honour medical exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccine.

“We’ve been sick long before COVID was a thing and we’ve suffered a lot,” she said.

Eliason is now fearful she will also have to miss out on her children’s theatrical performances and graduation – if the need for a vaccine passport is extended past the Jan. 31, 2022 end date set by the province.