Aubrey Plaza has revealed she was briefly paralyzed and unable to speak when she suffered an unexplainable stroke at age 20.
The “White Lotus” star, 40, spoke about the “wild” medical crisis during an appearance Wednesday on SiriusXM’s “Howard Stern Show,” per Delaware Online.
“It happened mid-sentence,” Plaza recalled of both the “craziest” and “kind of coolest thing about” the stroke, saying it “just happened” as she walked into her friends’ Queens apartment.
“That’s when I was paralyzed, but only really for a minute or something. I lost my motor skills really briefly,” she said. “The freakiest thing was I forgot how to talk.”
It took a doctor at the hospital asking Plaza to distinguish between her right and left sides, and her being unable to do it, that made everyone realize she had a stroke, as she previously told NPR’s “Fresh Air” in 2017.
The “Parks & Recreation” star said paramedics initially kept asking her if she’d taken drugs.
“I hadn’t,” she said. “I hadn’t really put anything into my body that day — except for birth control, which ended up being maybe the cause of the stroke.”
Plaza told NPR that in the years since, she’s “had some minor … tiny little strokes,” also known as transient ischemic attacks (TIAs).
An ischemic stroke occurs when blood supply to the brain is blocked or reduced, per the Mayo Clinic, while a hemorrhagic stroke leads to bleeding in the brain, caused by a leaking or burst blood vessel.