Within just a few days, she was experiencing hip pain. By the Tuesday after she'd gotten her shot, the pain was gone, replaced by numbness and difficulty controlling one leg. By the next day, the numbness had spread to both legs.
At the doctor's office, her doctor asked whether she'd recently received a flu shot.
"When I told him I had, he said, 'You're going to the hospital, you're going to be admitted, and you're going to have an emergency MRI,' " Dreiling recalled recently. "He meant right then."
Dreiling spent 13 days in the hospital and was diagnosed with transverse myelitis, a condition in which a patient's immune system begins attacking and destroying an insulating sheath around nerve fibers.
Today, the numbness in her right leg has largely gone away, "but sometimes my toes feel funny," she said, and she also has regular numbness in her left leg.
And even after a year of physical therapy, she still can walk only short distances -- and even then with a cane.
Eventually, she said, most of her friends stopped coming by, or calling, and she found herself becoming increasingly depressed.
"I was one of the people who helped patients," she said. Until her reaction to the vaccine, she'd been a phlebotomist at Mowery Clinic. "Then I became the person who needed help."
"I can't stand long enough to vacuum, I can't stand long enough to do dishes," she said. "I can't stand long enough to make a grilled cheese sandwich."
For longer distances, she has a motorized scooter, and a van with a motorized ramp at the side door.
She found having to use the scooter to get around Target, Wal-Mart or other stores "embarrassing," and she could tell people were looking at her and wondering why she needed the help.
Such equipment is also expensive, as are the medical expenses. Her insurance paid for one MRI each year, while for several years, she had two or three.
Getting some relief
In the fall of 2005, one of Dreiling's friends stumbled across a Web site with information about a compensation fund.
The fund was for people who had adverse reactions to various vaccines. The flu vaccine was added to the list in 2005, but that addition was retroactive for eight years.
Before long, she'd been in contact with Larry Michel, an attorney with Kennedy Berkley Yarnevich & Williamson law firm in Salina. In all, Michel and fellow Kennedy Berkley attorney Chris Kellogg have or are currently representing seven vaccine injury clients, including one in Florida and one in South Carolina. They've represented not only those with problems related to flu vaccine, but also with vaccines for diphtheria, polio, the combined measles, mumps and rubella and others.
The courts already have determined that those vaccines and others can cause problems in rare cases, Kellogg said, and have set up a federal trust fund to compensate victims.
That means that in most cases, plaintiffs and their attorneys don't have to take on a large pharmaceutical company.
"In other cases, it just comes down to a battle of medical testimony, physicians and medical literature," Michel said.
The Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund gets its money from a 75-cent excise tax on all vaccines. The tax on vaccines intended to prevent multiple diseases is 75 cents for each disease; the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine, for example, comes with an excise tax of $2.25.
"From what I've seen, the pharmaceutical companies are doing a pretty good job at putting a safe product out there," Michel said. "The point is to provide necessary compensation, but without putting the pharmaceutical companies out of business."
Unlike many product-liability cases, Michel said, "This isn't a situation where I see a lot of fault in the pharmaceutical companies."
Michel and Kellogg both urge anyone who thinks he or she has been harmed by a vaccine to call an attorney. There's a statute of limitations on claims. Plaintiffs must file a claim within three years of the onset of symptoms.
Just a few hundred people each year file a claim with the fund: 323 in 2006, 410 in 2007 and 344 this year. In a typical year, 50 to 60 claims are awarded, and about that many or slightly more are dismissed.
A typical claim takes two to three years to be resolved.
As of Dec. 31, 2007, the trust fund had a balance of $2.5 billion.
Dreiling's case was settled through the federal trust fund, and she got her check in February.
"The $115,000 was wonderful, and it helped pay off bills," Dreiling said. "But it went really quick."
And though welcome, the money doesn't come near being able to make up for her injuries.
"It doesn't cover the inconvenience, or the frustration," she said. "I want to be able to walk through Wal-Mart -- I can't go to the mall without this stupid chair."
Worth the risk?
After her experience, Dreiling said she no longer gets the flu vaccine, though she acknowledges a reaction such as hers is rare.
"I still see this as a one-in-a-million thing."
And while that's a phrase that's commonly tossed around, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that in this case, it's accurate, putting the odds of someone developing transverse myelitis as a result of a flu shot right at one in a million.
The odds of the flu vaccine leading to Guillain-Barré Syndrome -- a similar condition also resulting in nerve damage -- are between one million and two million to one, according to the CDC.
In both cases, more people contract the disease from a viral infection -- such as the flu -- than from vaccines, though the final result is pretty much the same.
That's why Salina neurologist Dr. Trent Davis, who was one of many doctors who treated Dreiling, still recommends the flu vaccine for most people.
He agrees that "people who have had problems with flu shots before need to be very careful," and that people with compromised immune systems should have a talk with their doctor before making a decision.
People with multiple sclerosis are among those who can have an adverse reaction, as in some cases, the flu vaccine can cause them problems.
But, Davis said, he usually recommends even that group with a known risk go ahead and get the flu vaccine.
"Any infection or fever can make it flare up," he said. "We tell them they're much better off getting the flu shot than getting the flu -- getting the flu will certainly make it flare up. I see more problems with MS patients in the winter who don't get the shot."
Because the flu vaccine is reformulated every year, reactions can vary, Davis said.
In cases where one of Davis' patients with MS decides against getting the flu vaccine, Davis said he recommends that everyone else in their household have the shot, so they don't bring the flu virus home to the patient.
Davis said he's had meningitis three times in the past, and started getting his annual flu shot after the second bout.
"I haven't really had the flu since then, and I've gotten my wife to start getting it since then," he said. In weighing the risks, he said, "a bad flu would do me more harm now than the risk of the flu shot, clearly. I'm sold on it."
n Reporter Mike Strand can be reached at 822-1418 or by e-mail at mstrand@salina.com.
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