Hailey Baldwin Bieber is speaking out about the impact of her health crisis on her ongoing physical and mental health.
In March, the 26-year-old model was admitted to the hospital with stroke-like symptoms caused by a blood clot in her brain. Upon her hospitalization, Baldwin Bieber was diagnosed with a patent foramen ovale or PFO, a small opening in the heart that didn't close the way it should after birth.
While she underwent a procedure to close the PFO, which she explained in a Youtube video shortly after as going "very smoothly," she elaborated on the health experience, describing it as something that was "very scary and very jarring" on the latest episode of The Run-Through with Vogue podcast.
"It was definitely the scariest thing I've ever gone through," she stressed.
Bieber Baldwin explained that she was in Palm Springs during her health scare. Although she's returned to the area various times, including during the recording of the podcast episode, she revealed that visiting the site is "very triggering" for her.
"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. But I think the bright side for me is that it led me to find out I had this hole in my heart," she continued, expressing that she has learned a lot about herself in the months after her hospitalization.
"I struggled with a lot of anxiety after. I struggled with a little bit of PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder] of just like the fear of maybe it was gonna happen again," she explained. "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."
The Rhode Skin founder added that while she is "open to talking about the experience if it could help somebody else," it was something that was "really hard to talk about" in the immediate months after it occurred.
"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. 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," she explained.
Although she added that she is "just now starting to come out of that kind of fight or flight feeling of being nervous about something bad happening again," she has slowly begun to enjoy life again without the anxiety or thoughts about what might happen with her health in the future.
"I look back at it and it could've been so much worse," she said. "So many worse things could have happened in that moment."
