Hailey Bieber has opened up about her hospitalisation for the first time.
The 25-year-old model was hospitalised with a blood clot to her brain on March 10, after suffering “stroke like symptoms.”
Hailey took to her YouTube channel yesterday to detail the scary experience, saying she wants to tell the story in her “own words.”
She described feeling a “weird sensation” in her right arm while sitting at breakfast with her husband Justin Bieber.
Her fingertips felt “numb and weird” and she said she suddenly “couldn’t speak.”
Hailey said in the video: “The right side of my face started drooping, I couldn’t get a sentence out. Immediately, I thought I was having a stroke.”
A medic was nearby and began to examine her as an ambulance was called.
Hailey said the facial drooping lasted 30 seconds, but she continued to struggle to formulate words as the medic asked her questions.
The model added that her anxiety was “making everything worse.”
She said: “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.”
Hailey stayed overnight in the hospital and underwent a series of tests to determine what caused the blood clot.
She scored a zero on the stroke checklist in the emergency room, and tests revealed that she had suffered a TIA (Transient Ischemic Attack), which is often called a mini-stroke.
Scans showed that she experienced a lack of oxygen to her brain for a period of time, caused by the blood clot.
Doctors decided a set of three events had contributed to the stroke: she had just started birth control without speaking to her doctor, she suffered issues from the birth control due to her proneness to migraines, and she had just traveled to and from Paris after recently recovering from Covid.
Hailey was discharged the following morning, but they still did not know how the blood clot had traveled to her brain.
She later visited UCLA for a follow-up, where she was diagnosed with a PFO – a small opening in the heart that usually closes after birth – after undergoing an ultrasound test used to detect strokes caused by blood clots.
Hailey was diagnosed with a Grade 5 PFO, which is the “highest grade” possible. The small hole in her heart measured between 12 and 13 millimeters.
Typically, a blood clot is filtered by the heart and absorbed into the lungs, but due to her PFO, the blood clot “escaped” through her heart and traveled to her brain.
Hailey then underwent a procedure to close the PFO under her doctor’s recommendation.
She shared that the PFO closure procedure went “very smoothly” and she is recovering well.
Hailey said in her video: “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 revealed that she takes aspirin and blood thinner daily, and she shared that she is no longer suffering from any related symptoms.
Hailey also gave a special shoutout to her doctors at the end of her video, and said she wanted to wait until she had the procedure before sharing the details of her experience publicly.
She ended the video: “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.”
