Aubrey Plaza spoke about the horrific side effects she suffered after suffering a stroke at the age of 20.
“It just happened,” Big city Star said during an appearance on Wednesday, September 11, at The Howard Stern Show according to Delaware Online. “I was paralyzed at the time, but only for about a minute. I lost my motor skills for a very short time. The craziest thing was that I forgot how to speak.”
Plaza said the health scare was a “wild” experience, especially because it came out of nowhere.
“It happened mid-sentence,” she recalled. “I was taking the train to Astoria to have lunch with my friends and I walked into her apartment – I hadn’t even taken off my jacket.”
This is not the first time Plaza has spoken openly about her stroke. In August 2017, she said that her friends initially thought she was joking, but Plaza was able to make it clear that she needed help.
“I think (my friends) thought I was joking… I always did something stupid,” she said in an interview with Fresh Air from NPR. “But after a few minutes they kept saying, ‘Should we call an ambulance?’ and I was awake enough to shake my head. I just kept shaking my head because I knew something was very, very wrong. But I didn’t know what it was.”
When paramedics arrived to treat Plaza, they initially did not believe she had suffered a stroke because she was so young.
“They thought I was dehydrated. And I really think they thought I had taken drugs because they kept asking me if I had taken drugs and I hadn’t,” she said at the time. “I hadn’t taken anything that day – except birth control.”
Aubrey Plaza and Jeff Baena secretly tied the knot in 2021 as they celebrated their 10th anniversary. The couple have been together since 2011 but have never confirmed when exactly they met or when their love story began. The former White Lotus star and the Horse Girl director have worked together on films such as Life After Beth and (…).
It wasn’t until Plaza met the doctor, who asked the actress to put her “right hand on her left knee.” After Plaza could no longer distinguish between her right and left hand, “it became clear to everyone” that she had suffered a stroke. She was then taken to the hospital’s stroke unit, where she stayed “a couple of nights” before being transferred to a hospital in Delaware near her family.
“There was no recovery. I mean, when you have a stroke, you have a stroke,” she told NPR. “There’s nothing you can do about it. The brain has to heal itself. And that part of the blood clot in my brain will never heal. It’s a tiny little black hole in my brain. So I did cognitive therapy. I went back to school in the fall.”
