An uncommon reaction left Cristina Calvert fighting for her life. She survived and is healthy, but others with injuries are struggling to receive compensation from the “black hole” federal program meant to help them.
In 2021, Cristina Schoolmaster spent Easter Sunday laid up on the couch, forced to cancel the egg hunt planned for her seven-month-old son. The pain had begun on Friday morning, radiating across the right side of her face. Each day, the sensation crawled across her skull—from right to left and back again. The doctor at the urgent-care clinic felt confident her headache would subside with migraine medication. It did not.
Once the right side of her neck began throbbing, Schoolmaster visited an emergency room near her home in Potomac. CT scans revealed no obvious inflammation, abscess, or mass, and she was sent home with another prescription for migraine medicine.
She limped into a neurology office a week later. The doctor nodded along as Schoolmaster described the constant, blinding pain in her head, the useless pills she’d already been prescribed twice, and the creeping ache in her left leg. After a few minutes, the neurologist cut her off, ready to diagnose: Schoolmaster was experiencing a migraine, and she had probably strained her neck while holding her baby. Also, she should put some ice on her ankle.
By 7 o’clock the next morning, Schoolmaster was back in the ER, begging for more imaging. She spent several hours at the bottom of the triage list, and when her turn finally arrived, the radiology technicians were visibly irritated. “Why are you here?” one grumbled as he injected dye into her arm. “Your scans were fine.”
Not long after Schoolmaster emerged from the CT tube, hospital staff filed into her room. “You said you received a Covid vaccine two weeks ago?”
Schoolmaster nodded, and their expressions darkened.
“Which one?”
