Aubrey Plaza opened up about the terrifying side effects she suffered from a stroke at age 20.
“It just happened,” says the Megapolis the star said during an appearance on Wednesday, September 11 The Howard Stern Show per Delaware Online. “Then I became paralyzed, but really only for a minute or something. I lost my motor skills for a very short time. The craziest thing was that I forgot how to talk.”
Plaza said the health scare was a “wild” experience, especially because it came out of nowhere.
“It happened in the middle of a sentence,” she recalled. “I took the train to Astoria to have lunch with my friends and walked into their apartment – I hadn’t even taken off my jacket.”
This isn’t the first time Plaza has opened up about having a stroke. In August 2017, she talked about how her friends initially thought she was joking, but Plaza was able to tell that she needed help.
“I think [my friends] I thought I was joking… I always did something stupid,” she said in an interview with NPR’s Fresh Air. “But after a few minutes they kept saying, ‘Do you want us to call an ambulance?’ and I was aware enough to shake my head yes. I kept shaking my head because I knew something was very wrong. But I didn’t know what it was.”
When paramedics arrived to treat Plaza, they initially didn’t believe she was having a stroke because she was so young.
“They thought I was dehydrated. And I really think they thought I was on drugs because they kept asking me if I had been on drugs, and I wasn’t,” she said at the time. “I hadn’t really put anything into my body that day and – except birth control.”
Aubrey Plaza and Jeff Baena secretly got married in 2021 while celebrating their 10th anniversary. The pair have been dating since 2011, but they have never confirmed exactly when they met or when their love story began. The White Lotus alum and the Horse Girl director have collaborated on films like Life After Beth and […]
It wasn’t until Plaza met the doctor that he asked the actress to place her “right hand on her left knee.” After Plaza could no longer tell the difference between her right and left sides, everyone realized she had had a stroke. She was then taken to the hospital’s stroke unit where she stayed for “a few nights” before being transferred to a hospital in Delaware near her family.
“There was no recovery. I mean, if you have a stroke, you have a stroke,” she told NPR. “You can’t do anything about it. Your brain has to heal itself. And that part of the blood clot area in my brain will never heal. It’s a tiny little black hole in my brain. So I had a cognitive, you know, therapy that I went to. I went back to school in the fall.”