When Lexi Eddy sent Snapchats to her friends on March 10, they noticed something was off.
The 18-year-old’s face was drooping on one side, and she couldn’t move her left side. Eddy had just fallen out of a chair and didn’t understand what was going on.
“What’s wrong with your face?” her friends asked. “It looks like you’re having a stroke. Are you good?”
Eddy, who lives in Atwater, Ohio, about 26 miles southeast of Akron, was eventually rushed to the hospital. There, she learned she had a stroke.
She captured that stroke in her Snapchat photos that day, she said. While she no longer has the photos, she recalls something feeling odd.
“You could definitely see my mind wasn’t there,” Eddy told USA TODAY on May 15, during National Stroke Awareness Month.
The teenager had no movement on the left side of her face, while the right side was fine, and in one video her sister recorded at the hospital, she had visible issues with her left hand.
“You can just see my hand and how I had no control of it, and it was just bent,” she said. “It was weak, and I couldn’t move it, but it would automatically just move on its own.”
Teen had a normal day before a stroke left her unable to move her left side
Eddy had previously had a concussion months earlier, but the day of her medical emergency, things were pretty standard. She had gone to school and then work. She was pulling a cap off a pen when something changed.“I got this whole whiff of lightheadedness,” she said, adding that it eventually turned into a “pounding headache” and everything felt “a little fuzzy.”
Eddy fell out of her chair at work multiple times that day. She tried calling her mom but the call wouldn’t go through, she told USA TODAY. She then managed to text her mother “SOS.” The last time she fell, coworkers told her to stay put on the floor while someone called for help. She was rushed to a hospital, where she waited, wondering what was happening. She got an MRI, then was taken back to her room, where emergency responders were waiting.
There, employees told her she had a stroke, then took her to a second hospital, Akron General, part of the Cleveland Clinic. She had previously been able to see her father, but at Akron General, she found herself alone in a room, she said. A team of doctors then rushed in, and tears welled up in her eyes.
“It’s just me, alone in this room with doctors standing around me, asking me questions,” she recalled. “I was like ‘Wow. This is a lot more serious than I really initially thought it was.’”
