KayLynne Felthager was driving home from Walmart when she felt a headache coming on and instinctively stretched her neck to the right to relieve some tension. It had become somewhat of a habit to crack her neck after a long day at work, but this time was different. Almost immediately after hearing the crack in her neck, Kaylynne felt a sharp pain in her neck.
The pain in Felthager’s neck didn’t feel normal, and the fact that it did not subside over the next several days didn’t exactly feel reassuring, but she only relied on over-the-counter pain medication to deal with it, instead of seeing a doctor. It wasn’t until five days later that things really took a turn for the worse.
KayLynne was sitting in her kitchen, doing her makeup before a date, when a bright light suddenly flashed in front of her eye, and she lost her vision. Blinking hard didn’t seem to help, but in about 15 minutes, her vision returned, and she just brushed it off as a one-off freak occurrence.
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“I had, like, a blinding light come through my right eye, and then lost vision,” she recalls. “It was just like I could see this bright light, but nothing else out of the right side.”
Soon after losing her vision, KayLynne felt the entire right side of her body become tingly and then numb. But she only realized something was very wrong with her when she started losing the ability to speak coherently. Instead of forming words, she uttered “jumbled gibberish”, so her husband immediately drove her to the hospital.
Once at the hospital, doctors performed a CT scan, which revealed that she had suffered a stroke. After talking to medical staff about the pain she felt after stretching her neck in the car a few days prior, KayLynne was told that the innocent neck cracking had caused an artery dissection, which later resulted in a blood clot reaching her brain and causing a stroke. Luckily, the blood clot dissolved quickly, so the doctors didn’t need to operate.
KayLynne Felthager has since made a full recovery, but she claims that the experience changed how she thinks about her body and how quickly things can go wrong.
The neck is a very sensitive area of the body, and even the simplest movements, like turning your head too quickly, can lead to a stroke.
