4. Patient was a healthy, smart, imaginative, articulate, beautiful, and sweet little girl. She spent a lot of time at home with her dad her first few years, as he was a full-time student earning a second degree in mechanical engineering. She learned to read by five years old, the daughter of a first-grade teacher, turned stay at home mom. We used to joke that our kids had the best of both sides academically with parents whose strengths were in opposite areas. She was blessed with a little sister, when she was three years old. Patient wanted to learn to ice skate when she was in first grade. In elementary school she also participated in Girl Scouts, gymnastics, dance, violin. She was sociable, loved camping, swimming, kayaking, traveling, and spending time with friends and family, especially older relatives whom she cherished. She had an incredible imagination and loved pretend play, creating elaborate stories with her dolls and playing with her little sister for hours. She was also creative and loved crafting, baking, and sewing.  5. As patient entered middle school, she became more focused on her passion, figure skating. She practiced about 4-5 days a week, had a coach, skated competitively, and participated in ice shows. Her body was strong and muscular from years of skating. She was a straight A student, balancing her favorite sport with great grades. She loved learning, was organized, and extremely driven. However, she balanced this well with a whole host of activities she loved. She was a natural leader, volunteered, and still spent a lot of time playing with her little sister and friends.   6. In the fall of 2018, patient entered her freshman year of high school. She was attending a college prep private high school with challenging classes. Two of her freshman classes were sophomore level courses. She had tried out and been selected for the high school dance team and danced 2-3 mornings a week before school started and skated after school each day. On the weekends she continued a busy schedule in these sports and had time for the other things she enjoyed. She was at the top of her game, with a promising future. She dreamed of becoming a doctor and going to specific area, (a favorite travel destination), for college.   7. In the fall of her freshman year, patient received the first of two Gardasil vaccines. Shortly after this she started complaining of random pain, including hip pain. At first we did not pay too much attention to it. But there were episodes of strange symptoms including feeling like she might pass out. In March of 2021, she started coming off the ice rink in extreme pain, sometimes having to take her skates off and unable to finish a session.   8. In April of 2021, patient received her second Gardasil vaccine. She started complaining of horrible pain and her hip pain was getting worse. We made a doctor?s appointment with an orthopedist. Patient started calling me from school, crying, having trouble walking. Patient told me she did not think she would ever win a skating award again. She seemed sad, run down, sickly, and her grades went down, going from a 4.0 her first semester to a 3.3 her second semester. This had never happened before, and we knew it was not just because it was high school. She had proved she could do it her first semester. One day she called me from the school bathroom, experiencing what sounded like a panic attack. She had never suffered from anything like this and mental health problems do not run in our family. She was experiencing intense anxiety, and I was just shocked.   9. At her orthopedic appointment in May, I remember it being so difficult to explain to the doctor the pain patient was in, because it was not just her hip, it was her knee, foot, wrists, arm, etc. We focused on her hip and thought maybe her knee and foot were related. She spent the summer in physical therapy, taking a few months off skating and dancing, but it became clear that none of the things we were doing were helping when she attempted to dance and skate a few times that Fall. The pain was just too much to continue. One doctor recommended Cortisone shot but they made patient worse instead of better. It was scary to watch how quickly she was going downhill.   10. In the Fall of 2021, patient's sophomore year, despite not dancing or skating, patient's hip problem was spinning out of control. She was having trouble walking from class to class at school. No one could really figure out what was wrong, (we got an incorrect diagnosis from Dr.'s office of a labral tear). They said the MRI also showed a ligament tear, but I do not think we would have known about that without an MRI. Dr. was not helpful.  11. We ended up where Dr. looked at her hip and said she did not have a labral tear (a very serious misdiagnosis that could have led to an unnecessary surgery) and asked me if we had done any recent blood work on patient. First Dr. suspected patient was suffering from an autoimmune disorder and thought we should go home and follow up with labs along with another Cortisone shot in her hip but in a new place.   12. I took patient back to her primary care physician, who diagnosed her with Fibromyalgia. I took her to a rheumatologist who confirmed that diagnosis. Those two doctors put her on a prescription anti-depressant, Cymbalta and sleep medication and gave a lot of advice about managing a chronic pain condition with exercise and positive mental health activities.   13. It was horrible watching what patient's life had become.  Her world now revolved around managing a chronic pain condition. She missed school frequently. Her grades suffered. She slowly lost her social connections: Patient was not at school and when she was, she was not herself. She missed out on social invitations and did not participate in school-related activities.   14. We waited months to see an integrative medicine specialist who offered us vitamins and a support group for teens with serious medical conditions. It was heart wrenching. The tears and angst were more than just normal teenage heartache. I worried that she might figure it out and consider overusing the prescription sleep medication, a serious pharmaceutical. The rheumatologist had warned me that people use this drug to commit suicide because it slows down their heart and they just go to sleep and do not wake up.  15. As if things could not get worse, in the Fall of her junior year, 2022, when patient's schedule got busier and the stakes became higher with a tougher workload at school, it was like any stability in patient's health disappeared, and she fell off a cliff. She went from functioning and handling the pain, (all she had left was school and a once-a-week piano lesson) to not being able to get out of bed. She often slept for 18 hours straight and woke exhausted. She walked around in a fog, the symptoms were bizarre, scarry, and debilitating. She had frequent stomach pain and trouble eating. The doctor diagnosed her with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and sent information on pacing herself. ?Are you kidding?? I felt like saying. All she was doing was school!   16. Patent was fearful she was dying, and we were not sure she was not. She looked horrible and her symptoms presented as a kid who had been poisoned or was suffering neurological damage.  Desperate to help her, I started doing full-time research on who to go to, how to help her. I was the one that figured out she had a thyroid problem which led to discovering a cortisol and hormone problem. I begged for her to be able to see an endocrinologist but by then I had alerted the medical doctors to the fact that I knew patient had been injured by the Gardasil vaccine and they refused to give us an appointment, saying that putting her on thyroid medicine would cause her thyroid to stop working. It already was not working. I also asked about seeing a neurologist because patient's symptoms were connected to her brain and nerves. Neurology would not see us because we were already in rheumatology. We turned to functional medicine, and those doctors helped us figure out the damage that had been done to her brain and body and how to go about getting some relief for her.   17. Unfortunately, we did not seek their help fast enough, and in October patient lost full-time school. After a big meeting, we decided to remove patient's 3 AP classes from her schedule and her transcript shows a medical withdrawal. She was no longer competitive for the college of her dreams. She was too sick to take the SAT with her peers.   18. Patient's existence had become trying to make it to school on the days she had her easier classes, online school, supplements, medical appointments and therapies. We spent thousands and thousands of dollars seeking help. Every functional medicine doctor asked me the same question when I told them about the Gardasil vaccine. ?Please tell me you didn?t get the second dose?. Wow. Half the medical world knows how dangerous Gardasil is while the other half chooses to close their eyes. I even had the integrative medicine doctor tell me how patient was not an exception to being a teen with Fibromyalgia, how they had tons of kids in their practice with this despite the fact that it is a disease that targets women 40 and over.  19. Functional medicine has helped us uncover other damage to patient's health and knowledge is power; we have been able to ease some of patient's symptoms. She is now on thyroid medicine and progesterone-her body makes only a minuscule amount. Her cortisol level shows she is suffering from Phase 1 adrenal gland dysfunction. We learned she now has serious gluten and corn intolerance. We got the stomachaches under control following this advice.  Her body was starting to attack itself if she ate certain things like salmon, a healthy food she had eaten her whole life. We avoid anything that might be a problem. We tested her for Lyme Disease, and it shows exposure and elevated levels of bacteria, a shock and an indicator that her compromised immune system cannot fight off bacteria. Her gut is compromised, she is sensitive to mold, she ended up with huge cavities in her permanent teeth within a year of the Gardasil vaccine, a problem she had never had.   20. For a year I have been unable to write this. I used to wake in the middle of the night sobbing, with such intense grief I could not function. It is difficult to explain the guilt and unimaginable pain of watching your healthy child become incapacitated. I worry about her mental health. She sees a therapist every week who has helped her work through some of her own grief. She suffers from bouts of severe anxiety, similar to PTSD. Her brain associates the fall season with crashing medically/physically and major medical issues. She lives in fear that the stability we have brought to her life with some treatments will disappear.  21. There are still treatments that patient would benefit from, but they require time and money, and the things that work are outside of our health insurance and hospital system. They are treatments that are not recognized in this country but there are studies on these therapies, and they are used in other countries. Patient would benefit from hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which would run about $10,000-$15,000 for the 40-60 sessions that have been proven to heal brain lesions. She would also benefit from ozone therapy. We tried some of this and it really helped to stabilize her health, but it costs $300 a session. Ideally, she would have it a few times a week for several months.  22. My hope for patient is that she can handle college and attend; that she will be able to become pregnant someday if she wants; that there will be money to pay for and finish her therapies; that mainstream medicine will recognize the damage the Gardasil vaccine has caused in thousands; and there will be work on treatments and therapies to counteract the damage it has caused and that patient will benefit from them.  I also pray she does not contract Parkinsons, early dementia, or cancer from the toxins she has been exposed to, but I know these are high hopes and that time will only tell if patient can get pregnant, or if her life will be affected with further medical problems.  I have many more hopes and anger that are more general about the Gardasil Vaccine. My younger daughter will never receive the Gardasil vaccination. Now I get to seem like a crazy anti-vaxer to others if I share our story, when the reality is, that our children are vaccinated. I feel so angry sometimes my heart feels like it will explode outside my chest, or so filled with grief I could lay down and die. So instead, I avoid thinking about it and trudge on, managing patient's health instead of going back to work which was always the plan for our family.