Back in April, Hailey revealed she suffered a mini-stroke caused by a blood clot that traveled through a hole in her heart up to her brain.
While doctors were able to get to the root of the incident and repair the hole in her heart, Hailey says she lived with the trauma of her stroke for quite a while.
“To experience something that I had zero control over happening in my body was very scary and very jarring,” Hailey said during an appearance on The Run-Through with Vogue podcast.
While Hailey says she didn’t want the medical emergency to turn her into “the type of person that was going to be afraid all the time of something bad happening,” she admits she did deal with PTSD.
“I struggle with that anxiety, just in general already. I struggled with a little bit of PTSD of just, like, the fear of maybe it was gonna happen again,” Hailey explained.
She continued, “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.”
For a while, Hailey says it was difficult to talk about her mini-stroke because it brought back “the feelings” of going through that experience.
On top of that, Hailey shared that she was even scared to go back to her home where it happened, explaining that it was a “bit of a strange, triggering kind of feeling.”
“I’m just now starting to come out of that kind of fight or flight feeling of being nervous about something bad happening again or having another mini-stroke or the hole in my heart not being closed,” Hailey said.
Looking to the future, Hailey is trying to have a more positive outlook on her health and make sure to remind herself that doctors were able to get to the bottom of things.
“The biggest reset for me was like having to really digest and know that, yes this is something that happened to me, yes it was very scary, yes it was like a freak situation,” she shared. “But you’re okay 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.”
Hailey added that she’s now at the point where she’d like to “be able to continue to release it” and enjoy her life.
“I felt so edgy about it for the last like almost year,” she said. “I look back at it and it could’ve been so much worse. So many worse things could have happened in that moment.”
For now, Hailey says she’s just “grateful” that she’s okay.
You can listen to all that she had to say here.
