Hailey Bieber is speaking out about her March 10 hospitalization for the first time.
In her “Telling my Story” YouTube video posted on Wednesday (April 27), Baldwin Bieber details exactly what happened, and where she’s at now with her health in “[her] own words.”
In the video, the model shares how her day started like any other day. Her and her husband, Justin Bieber, were sitting down eating breakfast when she felt a tingling sensation run down her right arm and into her fingertips.
“Justin was like, ‘are you okay?’ and I didn’t respond because I wasn’t sure,” Hailey recounted. “When I went to respond, I couldn’t speak. The right side of my face started drooping, I couldn’t get a sentence out.”
Immediately, she thought she was having a stroke. The 28-year-old singer called for a doctor to help his wife, and called 911. While a doctor was running tests on her, Hailey says her mind was racing, thinking about what was happening to her.
“I had so many things running through my head, the number one thing being ‘I’m having a stroke, I’m really scared, I don’t know what’s going on.’”
She says the doctor was asking her questions asking if she knew where she was, what her name was, what day it was, and while she knew the answers to all the questions, she couldn’t speak them out loud.
“I couldn’t get it out and say it. It was like my tongue and my mouth could not form the sentences and the responses.”
Shortly after, the model was taken to Eisenhower Medical Center where they confirmed she suffered from a small blood clot in the brain known as Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA) or a ministroke.
Doctors thought the stroke was caused by a perfect storm. She had recently started up new birth control, she had traveled to and from Paris in a short amount of time without getting up and walking around, and she had just recovered from Covid.
When she was released from the hospital, she decided to get more tests done at UCLA Medical Center. There, they ran a test called TransCranial Doppler and found that Hailey had a small hole in her heart called Patent Foramen Ovale (PFO). Roughly 1 in 4 people suffer from the medical condition but many people never know they have it.
“I did this test and they found that I had a grade 5 PFO which is the highest grade that you can have,” Hailey said. “So mine was fairly large.” The small hole measured between 12 and 13 millimeters.
Doctors recommended Hailey undergo a PFO surgery which inserts a small plug into the hole, blocking the opening, and allows the heart to grow over the plug and heal itself. She says she recently had that procedure done and she is feeling, “really great,” and her recovery went “really well.”
At the end of the video, Hailey thanked all of the doctors who took care of her and said that she wanted to share her story in case anyone else has suffered from the same thing that she did.
“It’s kind of hard for me to tell this story. Up until now I’ve only told friends and family and people that I know and that I’m close to but I feel like it was important for me to share this because it was already kind of a public situation,” Hailey ended the video. “I also wanted to wait to explain everything until my procedure was done and finished and everything had gone smoothly and was okay.”
See her full Youtube video here:
