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He can no longer eat, no longer drink water, and after two and a half years of waiting, the Canadian government denied him compensation.

Jasmeet Grewal was once a healthy, athletic young man who "felt like I was on top of the world." Two months after his second Pfizer dose, that world collapsed. Crippling cramps spread through his legs and hamstrings, then refused to let go. Doctors initially dismissed his condition as psychological, he testified at the inquiry into Canada's COVID-19 vaccine fallout last week.

"This video is taken around the time a neurologist is telling you this is in your head — basically that you're mentally ill," Inquiry Counsel Shawn Buckley noted, pointing to footage of Grewal struggling to walk following his injury.

He was eventually diagnosed with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, a condition attacking the nerves throughout his body. Severe demyelination of his nerve fibers followed, leaving him unable to walk and triggering the cascade of complications, including gastroparesis, which now require him to be fed through two permanent pumps.

One pump feeds directly into Jasmeet’s stomach, the other pushing nutrition straight into a vein in his chest. A third diagnosis, postural tachycardia syndrome, means that his heart races violently just from sitting up.

He has not walked since, and despite submitting more than 8,200 pages of medical documentation to Ottawa's Vaccine Injury Support Program — recently rebranded the Vaccine Impact Assessment Program — the claim was denied.

The board ruled that the eight-to-ten month gap between his second shot and hospitalization had to be something, anything, other than the rushed to market COVID-19 injections.

Today, Grewal is still fighting that decision, now tangled in a bureaucratic "switchover" he says has stalled her appeal indefinitely.

Even getting to Parliament Hill to tell his story was its own ordeal. Grewal and two friends carefully measured train aisles against his wheelchair and IV pole dimensions, charged medical pumps overnight to stretch their battery life, and walked the final stretch from the hotel to the inquiry in the rain when no accessible transport could be found.

A single dead battery, he explained, can turn a 12-hour medical routine into a 15-hour day.

Through it all, Grewal says the hardest part wasn't the pain — it was not being believed.

“A lot of the doctors that I spoke with said it’s very difficult to prove that it is [the vaccine],” he relayed, “but it’s almost just as difficult to prove that it’s not.”

Grewal’s message to Canadians still calling stories like his a "conspiracy" is to simply listen.

"Try to understand what they have gone through,” he said. "Once you hear multiple stories… make your decisions after that.”