Hailey Bieber has opened up about the anxiety and trauma she experienced after she suffered a mini-stroke last year.
The model and Rhode Beauty founder, 26, experienced a transient ischemic attack, often simply called a mini-stroke. In a YouTube video, Bieber explained the episode was caused by a blood clot that travelled to her brain.
“I struggled with a lot of anxiety after,” she recently said on Vogue’s The Run-Through with Vogue podcast.
“I struggled with a little bit of PTSD, of just, like, the fear of maybe it was gonna happen again.”
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“It was just a feeling that I was, like, ‘I never want to experience that ever again’. It was so terrifying, so jarring, so discombobulating in every single way that you could imagine.”
At the time, Bieber explained in her YouTube video that doctors had found a hole in her heart, which had allowed the blood clot to travel from her heart to her brain and cause the stroke.
Afterwards, Bieber underwent a procedure that put a permanent device in her heart to close the hole. She revealed it took a few months for that to happen, but she is now feeling much more “complete” since it’s healed and closed.
In the podcast interview, Bieber called the stroke “the scariest thing that I’ve ever gone through” but added that time has helped her to process it.
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“The biggest reset for me was having to really digest and know, that ‘yes, this is something that happened to me, yes it was very scary, yes it was a freak situation but you’re OK now, and we did get to the bottom of it and you do have a healthy body, you are a healthy 26-year-old woman’,” she explained.
“I spent so much of my brain time thinking about this situation, where I’m at the point where I’m like, ‘I’d like to continue to release and just live my life and enjoy it because I felt so edgy about it for the last, almost a year.'”
Bieber also noted she felt “very grateful” for having access to “amazing doctors and nurses that helped me heal and get to the bottom of what happened.”
She added she struggles with anxiety “about several different things”, so the experience of the stroke had quite an impact on her mentally.
“To experience something that I had zero control over in my body was very scary and very jarring,” she said. “I also didn’t want it to turn me into the type of person that was going to be afraid all the time of something bad happening because I struggle with that anxiety already,” she noted.
At the time of the experience, sources claimed that Hailey’s husband, Justin Bieber, 28, was also “traumatised” by the experience, given they were together when it happened.
The pair were reportedly sitting at the breakfast table together when she started experiencing stroke-like symptoms, which included trouble with her speech and her fingertips going numb.
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