Kevin Street was a top-two wireless salesman, competing with over 400 stores, when he took a shot that changed his life forever.

As a father of seven, Street worked 14-hour days without complaint and now, it’s been 1,951 days and counting that he'll never get back. "I felt it go through my body," Street recalls of the moment the COVID-19 injection went in his arm.

Within hours, the shakes started. Within weeks, he was soaking through his clothes daily, collapsing on his own back deck while his wife stood over him, certain he was joking, until she realized he wasn't.

What followed reads less like a medical file and more like a slow-motion nightmare: full-body tremors lasting up to two and a half years, 13 brain lesions, blood clots, a leg swollen with bruising doctors initially mistook for deep vein thrombosis.

According to Street, neurologists called his case "fascinating" — as if he were a specimen rather than a patient.

But the injury is only half of his story. The other half is what happened when Street turned to the system meant to help him.

Go Ad Free

For four weeks, emergency room staff tested him for methamphetamines and opioids instead of investigating what was actually happening to his body. It was his wife who ultimately saved his life, driving him to a larger hospital where he found a ward full of patients who looked eerily like him.

It was only after years of waiting that Street finally landed a spot in Canada's top disability program, KITE, which admits it cannot fix him, only attempt to ease his suffering. He says that access to most medical services comes through technicalities. A diabetes diagnosis, for instance, unlocks the door to treatment, although not for his actual condition.

Even the treatment he did qualify for has become its own quiet cruelty — promised, delayed, and rescheduled again just last week, more than two years after he was first told help was on the way.

Then there's the Vaccine Injury Support Program that was recently rebranded, restructured, and lost Street's file entirely. He remains in limbo, told he's still six to twelve months from a decision.

When Street finally appealed to his own member of Parliament, the reply he received should alarm every Canadian: the sentiment was that escalating his case would simply mean someone else in the same broken system would wait longer.

"We're left here, and we're afraid," Street says.

This is what happens when informed consent is skipped, when institutions stall instead of listen, and when a healthy, hard-working Canadian father becomes invisible to the very government that promised “fair access to support” if something went wrong.

Five years on, Kevin Street is still waiting to be believed and receive that support.