It was a typical day of news reporting for anchor Julie Chin when she found herself stumbling over her words.
But it wasn’t just a slip of the tongue, Chin was having a stroke live on air.
She stumbled over her words several times and remembers losing sight in one eye before her arm went numb.
Her symptoms started in the beginning of the broadcast when she could only see half the words on the teleprompter.
She thought something was wrong with her contact lenses and adjusted them during a commercial break.
“It still looked funny, but I thought, ‘I can do this. I’m the only one there; I have to do this,’” she told CNN.
She tried to text her husband but had trouble putting it together.
“I need help. Something is not Run today. My work won’t work is working my help my…” she wrote.
When she got back on the air, she realized she couldn’t get her words out.
“I started to read, and the words would not come out of my mouth,” she said. “They were right in front of me, and I knew what I was reading and they just weren’t coming.”
She was struggling to finish the broadcast when her arm went numb.
Eventually, she realized she needed to take a break.
“I’m sorry,” she told her audience. “Something is going on with me this morning, and I apologize to everybody. Let’s just go ahead and send it on over to meteorologist Anne Brown.”
Thankfully, her colleagues realized something wasn’t right and called 911.
“We needed to get off air. We needed to make sure that Julie was getting the attention that she needed,” Brown, who stretched out her weather report as long as she could, said.
Doctors told Chin that she was having “the beginnings of a stroke.”
Chin described her past few days as being ” a mystery” while in the hospital.
“I’m glad to share that my tests have all come back great. At this point, Doctors think I had the beginnings of a stroke, but not a full stroke. There are still lots of questions, and lots to follow up on, but the bottom line is I should be just fine,” she wrote.
Chin shared her story in the hopes of warning others about heart help.
“I’ve learned that it’s not always obvious when someone has a stroke, and action is critical. This acronym helps identify the symptoms to look for: BE FAST and then if needed, be fast and call 911.
B.alance (Sudden loss of balance)E.yes (Sudden vision changes)F.ace (Facial droop)A.rms (One arm drifts downward)S.peech (Slurred/confused speech)T.ime & Terrible headache.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that strokes are the fifth leading cause of death in women. About one in five U.S. women between the ages of 55 and 75 will have a stroke.
But Dr. Rigved Tadwalker, a cardiologist at Saint John’s Health, said that more younger women are having strokes because of things like contraceptive use, which can cause heart attacks, stroke, and blood clots.
Model Hailey Bieber was hospitalized in 2022 after a “mini-stroke. Factors like high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, and smoking can also lead to strokes.
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