A Maryland woman had a stroke from performing a physically demanding yoga movement back in late 2017 and she is still recovering from chronic pain nearly 18 months on.
Rebecca Leigh, 40, still suffers from severe memory loss, headaches, and pain in her neck and face since she tried to perform a hollowback handstand at her Gambrills home, 23 miles northeast of Washington, on Oct. 8, 2017.
The headstand requires extending her neck, dropping her hips back and arching her lower spine. After finishing the movement, Leigh felt very pleased with herself but quickly noticed her vision was blurry and her left arm would uncontrollably flop around when she tried to put her hair into a ponytail.
She initially dismissed the loss of vision and control in her left arm as a slipped disc in the neck, which was diagnosed back when Leigh was in her early 20s.
It was only two days later when she noticed her pupils were different sizes that she realized there could be something “very, very wrong.”
She and her husband Kevin, 45, immediately presented to the nearby hospital emergency room where the woman had a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan that found she had actually suffered a stroke.
Doctors in the neurological intensive care unit spent five days trying to determine how Leigh could have had a stroke even though she exercised, ate healthy, and did not smoke.
Doctors informed Leigh her right carotid artery, one of four responsible for delivering essential blood to the brain, had torn while doing handstands.
The tear had sent a blood clot to her brain, caused a stroke, and also caused a small bulging aneurysm to develop. For six weeks after she suffered from constant headaches, difficulty in getting out of bed, and pain in her eyes when she was in a bright environment. She also lost 20 pounds.
“The pain it caused my eyes was excruciating. My usually bright, sunlight-filled house was kept completely dark for the first few months,” said Leigh who ran a mobile sunless tanning company. “The stroke caused massive head pain, unlike any headache I had ever experienced before ... the nerve damage made any sort of light unbearable.”
She also constantly heard a “whooshing” sound in her right ear for three months.
“That was the sound of the blood trying to get through my artery up into my brain,” Leigh said.
Just a month after having the stroke, she jumped back onto her yoga mat and decided it was time to practice less physically demanding moves.
“I simply sat on my mat in lotus pose and listened to my breath. I slowly led back up to simple stretches and the poses that felt most safe to me,” she said. “I knew that if I didn’t get back to my practice relatively soon after my stroke, I never would.”
After six months, Leigh’s doctor confirmed her carotid artery was completely healed.
Although she happily practices sun salutations more than a year after the stroke, she doubts she will ever completely recover to her former health condition.
“I know I will never be where I was before 100 percent,” Leigh said. “I was about 75 percent back to where I was before my stroke ... the fact that I can touch my toes is enough to make me smile.”
She cannot speak for more than a few minutes and feels a constant “tingly sensation” between her elbow and hand that is almost like a wave of electricity zapping back and forth.
“It’s very hard to recover from something so scary that came out of nowhere,” she said. “You think you’re doing everything right and then when something like this happens, it’s hard not to think that it can happen again.”
Leigh is devoting part of her time to encouraging other hardcore yoga fans through her 26,000 followers on social media to seek a primary health care professional immediately, if they feel unwell.
“I wanted to share my story so that something like this doesn’t happen to any other yogis. I had never heard of it happening before it had happened to me,” she said. “If I had read of just one incidence of something similar, I would have known that a stroke was a very real possibility when I was experiencing my symptoms ... that it wasn’t my neck, my herniated discs, or my nerves. It was my brain gasping for its life.”
