In an interview with The Defender, Shanna Carroll shared the heartbreak she experienced when her 17-year-old daughter Aubrynn suffered cardiac arrest, followed by major complications — and died less than two months after her second Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.
“She was a girly and hippie kid who loved flowy outfits, music and she really especially loved art,” Shanna Carroll told The Defender, describing her daughter Aubrynn Grundy. “She was shy but brave, and she wanted to work in human rights.”
Aubrynn, who had no known health issues, died in August 2022, less than two months after her second Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.
Her medical records, which her mom shared with The Defender, show that Aubrynn was diagnosed with COVID-19, myocarditis and other heart and lung complications, and she experienced three cardiac events.
Her death certificate listed COVID-19 and multi-organ failure as cause of death, her mother said.
WATCH: 17-year-old Aubrynn Grundy contracted COVID-19 a few weeks after her second dose of Pfizer, went into cardiac arrest, was hospitalized, given a cocktail of drugs, went into multi-organ failure, and tragically passed away.
— The Canadian Independent (@canindependent) March 24, 2024
Aubrynn Grundy lived in Livonia, Michigan. She was… pic.twitter.com/gYvYm1aMp1
Shanna said that as a socially concerned young person, Aubrynn, like so many members of the general public, was taught and believed that masking and getting vaccinated were ways to protect others.
They lived in Michigan, which had no vaccine mandates for schools. Aubrynn didn’t initially get the vaccine. However, in early 2022, she and her friend Rachel were selected to go on a summer trip called Pilgrimage for Youth. To participate, they were required to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
The program, sponsored by the Odd Fellows, is a competitive program open to 16- and 17-year-olds interested in learning about government, politics and international relations.
It was to be Aubrynn’s first and only trip away from home.
The program took the students to major cities in the U.S. and Canada, where they would go to places like Ellis Island and the United Nations. Because they planned to visit cities like New York and Boston and would enter Canada — all places with various vaccine mandates in place to enter some businesses and government spaces the student would visit — vaccines were mandatory for the trip.
In the weeks leading up to the trip, Aubrynn took her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on June 7, 2022, and the second dose on June 28. Other than some arm soreness, she had no symptoms initially and headed off with her classmates.
The students visited New York and Boston and were on their way to Canada when Aubrynn texted her mom, complaining that she felt weak and sick. Her chaperones tested Aubrynn for COVID-19, and contacted Shanna to let her know that her daughter tested positive.
The next day, Shanna and her family left their Michigan home at 2 A.M. to meet the student group at the Canadian border to pick up Aubrynn, bring her home and put her to bed.
Shanna said Aubrynn was weak and tired but her illness didn’t seem out of the ordinary at first. She didn’t have a fever, but was trying to hold in her coughs and felt achy. They decided to go to urgent care.
The urgent care facility was only 10 minutes from their house, but by the time they got there, Aubrynn was too weak to walk in and had to be taken in via wheelchair. After an initial triage assessment, they waited in the waiting room for four hours.
Halfway through that time, Aubrynn’s father Anthony came in to take over for Shanna who took her fussy toddler home to get ready for his birthday party. A couple of hours later, one of her children told her she needed to check her phone — she had 20 missed calls from Anthony.
“I called him immediately and he was hysterical* on the phone, and I knew, I just knew,” she said.
Aubrynn had gotten up in the waiting room, asked her father if they called her name yet and collapsed. Shanna said:
“He said when she fell, he tried to pick her up and he was too weak. So he had to scream for help. Once he realized her eyes were rolling into the back of her head, he immediately screamed. And then another nurse who was walking out who was not part of the intake with her, swooped her up and just took her to the back.
They had started working on her for about 10, 15 minutes before I got there. And when I got there, he said, ‘she has a pulse, but it took a little bit to get her there.’”
Aubrynn had suffered her first cardiac arrest. The urgent care team sedated Aubrynn with a number of drugs that Shanna said included Dilaudid (an opioid), fentanyl, morphine and ketamine, before airlifting her to the Children’s Hospital in Detroit.
Her medical records indicate she then had two other incidences of cardiac arrest and she continued to experience tachycardia — a fast and irregular heartbeat — in the pediatric intensive care unit.
Shanna said in the hospital, they hooked her up to a ventilator and an ecmo machine, a form of life support that takes over heart and lung function. They invited her family to sit with her.
“And it didn’t even look like her,” Shanna said. “She was swollen, she had tubes all over her. The tips of her fingers were starting to turn blue. It looked like she had a little bit of frostbite on the tip of her nose.”
That blue color, indicating possible gangrene, according to the medical records, slowly extended over her arms and legs.
The doctors didn’t provide the family with a diagnosis. They tested her for several different illnesses, Shanna said, “And her infectious disease doctors kept telling me, we don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know what’s happened.”
The family was informed that Aubrynn was on palliative care, which is specialized medical care that focuses on providing relief from pain and other symptoms of a serious illness. She was also treated with antibiotics.
But Shanna said she could see that Aubrynn was still in pain. The medical team did what they could to relieve that pain, she said.
When she checked the list of the medications Aubrynn was receiving, most of them were end-of-life drugs, she said.
She also said that she was never informed that they put Aubrynn on a remdesivir protocol, which is noted in the records.
Aubrynn was in the hospital for 20 days before the time came to let her go, because none of the treatments were working. Her mom said she died peacefully, surrounded by people who loved her and listening to her favorite music.
A nurse told her they didn’t need to do an autopsy, because they knew the cause of death and the family conceded.
“Then when we got the result back that it was COVID-19, I was shocked,” Shanna said. “I didn’t think that would’ve been on there because I didn’t think she had passed away from COVID-19.”
Shanna repeatedly asked the hospital staff if they had ever seen a case of COVID-19 like this. They hadn’t. They told Shanna they had seen “aches and pains and kids that needed to be monitored with asthma, but no deaths like this.”
Shanna and her family suspected her daughter’s condition was the result of a vaccine injury, but this was not a possibility the doctors ever mentioned. All her medical records noted that she was fully vaccinated.
Shanna said she had been concerned about the COVID-19 vaccine from the beginning, but as someone who had always preached freedom of choice, she wanted Aubrynn to be able to decide for herself.
“It was a huge thing for her to do on her own, as an adult. Also, in Michigan, 17 is the age of consent. So even if I told her no, she still could have gotten it,” she said.
Shanna said she was sharing Aubrynn’s story in solidarity with other vaccine-injured people. People’s stories are suppressed, she said, but they all need to be heard.
“It’s just horrible. Just all of it. They’re just brushed under the rug, the stories, the patients. And the stories are heartbreaking.”
Watch Shanna Carroll’s interview with CHD.TV here:
