A super-fit triathlete says her life was “taken away” after suffering severe heart damage just weeks after receiving the Covid vaccine.
Ingi Doyle, 56, a mother of two, was told there was a one in ten chance she would not survive surgery to address one of the many medical complications that followed her second shot of the Pfizer Covid vaccine.
Ms Doyle said she had “no health concerns” before receiving two doses of the vaccine in mid-2021 and was the epitome of health and fitness.
She had won medals competing in triathlons, participated in Iron Woman and half marathon events and trained 15 hours a week in addition to her job as a fitness instructor.
“My life revolved around sport and being completely active,” she told Daily Mail Australia.
‘He was in great shape, he was really strong.’
Ms Doyle, who migrated to Australia from Sweden in 1989, was vaccinated against Covid to protect her elderly parents.
“I wasn’t against vaccines. I had no reason to be, but I’ve never had a flu shot in my life, I’ve never been sick, I’ve always been 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.
Ms Doyle (left) said that if it weren’t for her partner Scott Elms (right), she doesn’t know how she would have gotten through a series of devastating diagnoses.
“But with my family in Sweden and my mom and dad getting older and sick, I thought, ‘Oh, well, I’m going to do this.'”
Ms Doyle’s first dose left her arm sore, but her second dose on 4 July 2021 was when “everything went to shit” in what has been classified as a suspected adverse reaction by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).
Ms Doyle said: “Literally the next day I woke up with a massive swelling under my armpit. It looked like a little water balloon hanging under my ribs.”
Over the next two weeks, Doyle said she felt fatigued. “Just walking was starting to get difficult and I didn’t know why,” she said.
“Suddenly, I felt a very strong and sharp pain in my lower abdomen, which 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 inside the heart.
The situation worsened over the next few hours before Ms Doyle was taken to hospital by her partner, Scott.
After a series of tests, Ms Doyle was told she had suffered an aortic dissection. a large tear in the inner lining of the heart.
“I was very scared, I was alone,” she said. Her partner was not allowed into the hospital due to Covid restrictions.
“I was in a lot of pain and thought I might die here,” he recalled.
“They also discovered that I had an enlarged heart, but they didn’t explain why. I had lots of scans and tests and was prescribed lots of medication. After five days I broke down, I was a mess.
It was just the beginning of a nightmare series of medical complications and surgeries, including a grueling 12-hour heart surgery where she suffered organ failure and spent two weeks being fed through a tube.
“I was unconscious and they gave me very strong medications that made me hallucinate a lot,” he said.
“I was very scared. I was in pain and I thought again that I was going to die.”
He subsequently suffered a hematoma (a pool of clotted blood), a pulmonary embolism (a clot blocking his right lung) and an infected skin graft that required major surgery.
Before receiving her second dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in July 2021, Ms Doyle (pictured) competed in age-group triathlons on the Sunshine Coast and described herself as “totally active”.
Ms Doyle’s operations saw her cut open from the breastbone to the pubic bone.
When Ms 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 end it was ‘could it be vaccines?'” Doyle said.
“The doctors said that couldn’t be right because the vaccine is applied in the arm, stays there for three days and disappears.”
Unconvinced, Mr Elms contacted renowned immunology professor Nikolai Petrovsky at Flinders University in South Australia.
He said Professor Petrovsky gave Scott a “very clear description” that his injury could have been caused by vaccine proteins found in his bloodstream.
“He sent some links to other similar cases he had seen,” he said. (Daily Mail Australia has requested comment from Professor Petrovsky.)
Ms Doyle said no one had offered the couple an alternative theory.
“They’ve looked for everything, they’ve looked everywhere for anything that could be the cause and they haven’t found anything,” he said.
‘The only thing they haven’t adequately looked for is the vaccine.
“In my opinion, the biggest problem we have in Australia is that there are no facilities to test for spike proteins. Where can we test for them?”
The vascular surgeon who performed the first surgery reported Ms Doyle to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) as having a possible adverse reaction to the vaccine.
Her reactions to the vaccine are listed as aortic dissection and fibromuscular dysplasia under case number 659726 in the TGA database.
Ms Doyle’s reactions to the vaccine are listed in the TGA database (pictured)
Ms Doyle (pictured right with Mr Elms) said she feels her old life has been “ripped away” from her.
Despite the TGA’s claims that it “closely monitors reports of possible side effects from Covid-19 vaccines”, Ms Doyle said she only received one phone call from someone checking her details.
She blames health ministers and the TGA for what happened to her and others.
“Their only job is to make sure that everything they push on people and everything they give us and recommend to us is ‘safe and effective’ – that’s their job and they failed,” he said.
‘I will never forgive them for what they have done.
‘Heart problems are not like a broken arm that heals in six weeks. We have these things for life and it is not just the injured person who suffers alone.’
The TGA told Daily Mail Australia that Ms Doyle had not been contacted because those who make a report “are not routinely contacted or given feedback on their adverse event report beyond the acknowledgement letter”.
However, in some cases reporters of adverse reactions are contacted if further information is required 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 TGA investigations confirm a safety concern potentially linked to a vaccine, swift regulatory action is taken, including communication about the issue to healthcare professionals and consumers,” the TGA said.
Ms Doyle said she wakes up every day with pressure in her chest.
“I have random stab wounds in the middle, on the left, on the neck, on the arm,” he said.
‘They can’t find one of my ovaries, they can’t see it because there’s too much clutter inside me.’
Their kidneys are only functioning at about 35 percent.
“This makes me tire very easily and my blood pressure unstable,” he explained.
‘I feel like I’m a walking time bomb and I live with a lot of uncertainty.
‘Once you’ve had a heart problem, any little sign or symptom makes you nervous and you never know when you’ll explode again.
“You can never move on with things, it’s like your life has been taken away from you.”
Mrs Doyle said the trauma of the past few years has also changed her disposition. “I’m not who I was and I’ll never be who I was,” she said.
‘My partner sometimes says, “You used to be so carefree.”
‘I’m still a happy person, a smiling person, but it’s like something has died inside me and I’ll never get that part back.
‘Unfortunately for me, my life as I knew it is over.
“I mourn my old self every day because I know it will never be the same.”