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Hailey Bieber is telling her own story. On Wednesday, the model shared a 12 and a half minute video on her Youtube channel titled “telling my story,” where she opened up about the terrifying ‘mini-stroke’ she had last month in March. The 25-year-old told fans she wanted to give an update about where she has been with her health, “in her own words.”
“I had a very scary incident on March 10th,” Hailey says at the start of the video as she detailed the physical sensations she had while at breakfast with her husband Justin Bieber.
“I was having a normal day, a normal conversion, and we were in the middle of talking, and all of sudden I had a weird sensation that kind of like traveled down my arm and my shoulder, all the way down to my fingertips” she explained.
Her fingertips began to feel numb, and Justin asked if she was okay. When she tried to respond the second time he asked, she couldn’t. “When I went to respond, I couldn’t speak. The right side of my face started drooping, I couldn’t get a sentence out,” she said. “So obviously immediately I thought I was having a stroke, like a full-blown stroke,” Hailey continued.
Justin asked someone to call 911 and there was a medic that happened to be in the area that asked her questions and tested her arms. “Definitely the scariest moment of my life. I had so many things running through my head” she said.
Hailey wondered if she would have permanent issues after the event and continued to have difficulty talking. “I could walk totally fine, at that point, it was like the speech issue,” she said. After she went back home, she waited for the ambulance, and her speech slowly began to come back. She quipped that while she was having difficulty talking when she heard the paramedics say she was 30, the 25 year old corrected them. “I wasn’t gonna let them age me 5 years,” she said with a smile.
Hailey was pretty much back to normal when she got to the emergency room, and after running tests, they found that she had suffered a small blood clot in her brain. They categorized it as a transient ischemic attack, which she described as a “mini-stroke.”
After leaving the emergency room, knowing only that she had a small blood clot, likely caused by her new birth control and a recent bout with COVID, Hailey headed to UCLA for more in-depth testing. After doing a Trans Cranial Doppler ultrasound test they soon discovered she had a patent foramen ovale (PFO), which is a hole in the heart that didn’t close the way it should after birth. She had the highest “Grade 5” PFO meaning it was fairly large, so when the small blood clot made its way to her heart, it escaped through the hole and traveled to her brain.
Doctors recommended she get a PFO closure procedure and a small, button-like object was inserted through the femoral vein in her groin to close the small hole. She explained that eventually, her heart tissue will grow back around the closure device and she will have it forever and carry on with normal life.
Thankfully, following the recent PFO procedure, Hailey says she feels great and is recovering very smoothly. “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 hopeful.