So scary.
Hailey Bieber has opened up about her recent hospitalisation, revealing that she suffered a ministroke and needed heart surgery.
After being rushed to hospital on March 10 with stroke-like symptoms, the 25 year old uploaded a YouTube video to set the record straight on what really happened.
Explaining that she began feeling a “weird sensation” up her right arm while sitting for breakfast with her husband Justin, before her fingertips went numb and she found that she couldn’t speak.
“The right side of my face started drooping, I couldn’t get a sentence out,” she said. “Immediately, I thought I was having a stroke.”
Thankfully there was a medic nearby and an ambulance was called. Her face drooping lasted around 30 seconds, and by the time she was in the ambulance, her speech began to return.
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“By the time I got to the emergency room, I was pretty much back to normal – [I] could talk, [I] wasn’t having any issues with my face or my arm,” she added.
She then underwent a number of tests to see what was wrong and it was discovered she had a blood clot in the brain. The tests later revealed she suffered a TIA – a Transient Ischemic Attack, often called a mini-stroke.
While she was discharged the following day, doctors told her there were three factors contributing to the clot, but they didn’t know how it travelled to her brain as they initially didn’t believe she suffered a PFO, or a hole in the heart.
After getting more tests done in UCLA, she was diagnosed with a PFO after undergoing a transcranial doppler, a “more accurate” and “in-depth” ultrasound test that is used to detect strokes caused by blood clots.
Hailey was then diagnosed with a Grade 5 PFO – the “highest grade” possible, with the small hole measuring between 12 and 13 millimeters.
Typically when a blood clot forms in the heart, it travels to the lungs to be absorbed, but due to the hole in her heart, it “escaped” and travelled to her brain.
Doctors initially thought it was caused by Hailey recently having Covid, or going on birth control pills but that wasn’t the case.
Hailey underwent a procedure to close the PFO, with a small, button-like object inserted through the femoral vein in her groin to close the hole, and her heart tissue will gradually grown back around it.
“The biggest thing I feel is I just feel really relieved that we were able to figure everything out, that we were able to get it closed, that I will be able to move on from this really scary situation and just live my life,” she said.
“If there’s anybody that watches this that has gone through the same thing or something similar, I definitely really empathize with you. And I understand how life-altering and scary it is.”
