Nearly a year after she suffered a mini-stroke, Hailey Bieber is opening up about how it has affected her mental health.
While appearing on Thursday’s episode of the “Run-Through with Vogue” podcast, the model shared that she has experienced anxiety as well as PTSD after she was hospitalized following the mini-stroke, known as a transient ischemic attack (TIA), last March.
“It was very difficult,” Bieber, 26, said. “I struggled with a lot of anxiety after. I struggled with a little bit of PTSD of just, like, the fear of maybe it was gonna happen again. It was just a feeling that I was, like, I never want to experience that ever again. I mean, it was so terrifying, so jarring, so discombobulating in every single way that you could imagine.”
While being hospitalized for the medical emergency, doctors discovered that the Rhode Skin founder had a small hole in her heart, known as patent foramen ovale or PFO. She underwent surgery to insert a device to permanently close the hole, with Bieber noting that the device is “in there forever.”
Reflecting on the health scare, she said, “It was something that was completely unexpected. You know, when you’re 25 and you’re young, you believe you’re really healthy, and you know, do things to maintain your health.”
“All the doctors kept saying it was just kind of a perfect storm,” Bieber continued. “It was a couple different factors that led to you having a small blood clot, and the blood clot traveled through the hole in my heart up to the brain, which is why I had, you know, what they call a mini-stroke.”
“It was definitely the scariest thing I’ve ever gone through,” she said.
Bieber shared that she was recording the podcast interview in Palm Springs, which is where she was when she suffered the mini-stroke.
“Even the first couple of times coming back here after was a little bit of a strange triggering kind of feeling for me because you just remember exactly how everything happened in that moment,” she said, adding, “But I think the bright side for me is that it led me to find out I had this hole in my heart.”
Despite the traumatic incident, Bieber said she’s “definitely very open to talking about if it could help anybody else.”
“I look back at it and it could’ve been so much worse,” she later added. “So many worse things could have happened in that moment. I’m just grateful that I’m okay, and that is, like, where I have to stay mentally.”
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