NEED TO KNOW
- KayLynne Felthager says she cracked her neck while driving home from Walmart and immediately felt unusual pain
- Days later, she lost vision, went numb on one side and couldn’t speak, prompting her husband to rush her to the ER
- Doctors told her she had an artery dissection and stroke, and she was flown by helicopter to a larger hospital for care
It was the kind of small, automatic movement most people wouldn’t think twice about: a quick stretch to pop her neck after a long day. But for KayLynne Felthager, that split-second habit would end up turning into a medical emergency she never saw coming.
“Okay, so it’s two different days,” Felthager says, explaining that everything started on Jan. 4, 2023, when she was driving home from Walmart and felt a headache coming on.
Felthager said cracking her neck was something she used to do all the time when headaches hit. “I used to always, it was a habit,” she says. “I would get a headache and I would immediately crack my neck.”
She remembered stretching her head far to the right until she felt a crack on the left side of her neck. She also noted that she didn’t use her hands to force it, something she said people online later assumed.
At first, she thought nothing of it and even felt a moment of relief. But almost immediately after, she said she felt sharp, severe pain radiating down her neck in a way that didn’t feel normal for her.
Over the next few days, the pain didn’t fade, and Felthager said she struggled to move her head without hurting. She relied on over-the-counter pain medication just to get through the discomfort.
Even as the ache lingered through the weekend, she tried to keep living her life and pushed through plans with her family. She said she noticed how strange it felt, but still didn’t suspect anything serious was building.
Then on Jan. 9, the warning signs became impossible to ignore. Felthager said she was sitting at the kitchen island doing her makeup before a date night when a bright light suddenly took over her right eye, and her vision disappeared.
“I had, like, a blinding light come through my right eye, and then lost vision,” she recalls. “It was just like I could see this bright light, but nothing else out of the right side.”
She tried blinking hard, hoping it would go away, and even attempted to research what was happening. But she said she couldn’t see clearly enough to make sense of anything, and the moment left her rattled.
About 15 minutes later, her vision returned, and she assumed she was heading into yet another headache. Still, her body didn’t feel right, and she said she told her husband something felt “off” as they drove into town.
Soon after, she said the entire right side of her body became tingly and then went numb. Even then, she describes the sensations as confusing more than frightening, like her body was throwing strange signals she couldn’t interpret fast enough.
The scariest moment, she said, was when she tried to speak and realized she couldn’t form real words. “It literally just came out, like jumbled gibberish,” Felthager says, remembering how her husband immediately turned the car toward the ER.
Once inside, doctors rushed her back, and from there, parts of the experience blur together. She remembers a flurry of movement, nurses working to start an IV, and being taken back for a CT scan with contrast.
In the middle of the chaos, Felthager said her mind latched onto one word as everything else felt unreachable. “The only word I could honestly think of was God,” she says. “And I just, like, kept repeating that.”
She recalls being shown picture cards as doctors tried to evaluate her, but she struggled to name what she was seeing. Slowly, she said things began to return, from recognizing loved ones to being able to speak again.
Eventually, Felthager said doctors told her she’d suffered an artery dissection and a clot had traveled to her brain, causing a stroke. She was told the clot dissolved before they had to intervene, something she said she still feels grateful for.
Because she lives in a small town in Colorado, she said doctors decided she needed to be transferred for more specialized treatment. She was flown by helicopter to a larger hospital, a detail that she said still feels surreal.
At the hospital, Felthager said doctors told her artery dissections can happen in situations involving chiropractic adjustments or cracking the neck. One doctor tried to calm her fears, but she remembers thinking it was easier said than done.
Her neurologist also offered another possible trigger: Felthager said she’d recently had the stomach flu and had been violently sick. “She was like, either from violently puking or from you cracking your neck, is what this happened from,” Felthager says.
Afterward, she said she was placed on heavy blood thinners and later continued on aspirin while she healed. For months, she followed up with regular CT scans until she said doctors confirmed she was fully recovered.
“Obviously, they were like, ‘Maybe stop cracking your neck,’ ” she says. “And I was like, fair. I will never again.”
Now, nearly three years later, Felthager said she feels healthy and back to normal physically. But emotionally, she said the experience changed how she thinks about her body and how quickly something can go wrong.
“I have a little more health anxiety,” she says, explaining that even small changes in her vision can still send her spiraling. She adds that anxiety sometimes extends to her kids and husband, too, because the stroke taught her how fragile “normal” can be.
In the time since, Felthager said life has moved forward in joyful ways, including welcoming another baby into their family. And unexpectedly, her story found a huge new audience when she posted about it on TikTok.
She said the viral video wasn’t some carefully planned warning, but a quick post she made while trying to grow her account. “Honestly, it was just like a filler post,” she says, explaining she expected her usual few hundred views.
Instead, she watched it blow up, and with the attention came intense reactions. “Oh, my goodness, I stopped replying because I was like, I can’t handle some of these people,” she says, laughing at how overwhelming the comments became.
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Looking back, Felthager said the biggest surprise was realizing how many people immediately saw themselves in her story. “People are, they can get really freaked out by health things,” she says, adding she understands because she lives with that anxiety now, too.
And while she knows her story can sound scary, she said her intention has never been to send people into panic. “I don’t want to scare people,” she says. “It’s just what happened to me.”
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