‘Nightmares for years.’ WA dad regrets COVID vaccine stance after daughter nearly dies

Jeff Trefry spent most of the COVID-19 pandemic being skeptical of it.

The Washington man said he was “one of those that was anti-vax” and who downplayed the severity of COVID-19 on social media, KXLY reported.

Then, his teenage daughter was infected by the virus. And as her condition worsened, bringing her to the brink of death, Trefry realized that the pandemic was all too real.

“I was watching a healthy 19-year-old die in front of me,” Trefry told KXLY.

Trefry’s daughter, Jadyn, first had a “small cough” around Sept. 1, Trefry told KREM. But her health continued to decline, and she tested positive for COVID-19 on Sept. 22.

For two days, she had no sense of smell or taste and had mild respiratory systems. Her symptoms continued to get worse and worse, and she spent time in the emergency room before being taken to a hospital in Spokane Valley by ambulance, KREM reported.

“She looked at me and said, ‘Dad, I don’t know what’s going on, but something isn’t right. I don’t feel normal,’” Trefry told KHQ. “A few hours later, I got the worst phone call a father on this planet will ever get. They called and said, ‘Mr. Trefry, your daughter’s prognosis is poor.’”

She was admitted into the hospital’s critical care unit with multisystem inflammatory syndrome, news outlets reported. The condition causes inflammation of different body parts, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes or gastrointestinal organs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The condition usually affects younger children and has no known specific cause, though many children who develop it previously had COVID-19 or had been around someone who did, the CDC said.

“My daughter’s 19, this wasn’t supposed to happen,” Trefry told KHQ. “When your baby opens their eyes with panic in them, gasping for air? I wouldn’t wish that on a person I hate. Nobody should see that. Not the nurses, not the doctors, and definitely not a parent.”

Jadyn was put on a ventilator, by which point she “had so much fluid on her lungs and in her lungs that she was basically drowning,” Trefry told KXLY.

“I didn’t recognize my own child. She didn’t look like herself,” Trefry told the outlet. “I will probably have nightmares for years about the things that I have seen this week.”

Until this experience, Trefry was “an anti-vaxxer,” he told KREM.

“I posted stuff on Facebook talking about how COVID wasn’t real and it was just another virus and they were blowing it out of proportion,” Trefry told the outlet.

But after watching his daughter struggle to hold onto her life, he began to feel guilty about his past behavior and beliefs.

“If I just would have shut up, she would’ve gotten the vaccine and my daughter would not be in this condition,” he told KXLY.

Trefry now urges others to take the pandemic seriously and remember that their choice to get vaccinated — or not — will have an impact on the others around them, including their children, KREM reported.

“I’ll probably have nightmares for the rest of my life because of this experience,” Trefry told KHQ. “The only silver lining of this is that my daughter didn’t die. That’s the only silver lining. I’m going to spend a lot of time the next few months feeling pretty guilty, and wondering if I’m the reason this happened.”

Jadyn is recovering from COVID-19, and there’s no set date for her release from the hospital, KXLY reported. Her doctors believe she won’t have any long-term issues from the virus in the future, KREM reported.

This story was originally published November 8, 2021 at 3:31 PM with the headline "‘Nightmares for years.’ WA dad regrets COVID vaccine stance after daughter nearly dies."