Hailey Bieber is getting candid about the “very scary” moment she suffered a mini-stroke last year and how it’s affected her mental and physical health since then.
In April, the model explained in a Youtube video that she had been rushed to the hospital the month prior with “stroke-like symptoms” caused by a blood clot in her brain while having breakfast with her husband, Justin Bieber, in Palm Springs, California.
In that video, she recalled feeling a “weird sensation” in her right arm and numbness in her fingertips before she was admitted to the hospital.
“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,” she shared during the latest episode of the “Run-Through with Vogue” podcast on Thursday.
Bieber — who later underwent a patent foramen ovale closure procedure to mend a hole in her heart — got candid about how “terrifying” the experience was.
“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,” the Rhode Beauty founder recalled.
Calling the mini-stroke “definitely the scariest thing I’ve ever gone through,” she added that returning to Palm Springs after suffering the medical emergency has been “very triggering” for her.
Though she’s visited the area numerous times since the incident, including during the recording of the podcast episode, she confessed that it wasn’t easy for her and felt “strange.”
“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 explained.
She added, “But I think the bright side for me is that it led me to find out I had this hole in my heart.”
Bieber said she is “just now starting to come out of that kind of fight-or-flight feeling of being nervous about something bad happening again” after battling anxious thoughts about her future health.
“I look back at it and it could’ve been so much worse,” she stressed.
Elsewhere in the interview, Bieber said that even though she is “open to talking about the experience if it could help somebody else,” it was still “really hard to talk about” initially.
“Even the YouTube video that I had made for my YouTube channel was hard for me. It brings back the feelings for me of going through that experience. It gets easier, and easier with time to be able to talk about it.”
She added, “I’m just really grateful that I was able to have had amazing doctors and nurses, and people that helped me get to the bottom of what actually happened.”