A woman has told of how she felt her brain 'explode' following warning signs before a stroke.
Morgan Bailey was only 22-years-old when she began to experience strange symptoms.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the symptoms were actually signs of a stroke.
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Morgan had been working at a school when she began feel 'strange' symptoms, which included an 'excruciating' headache as well as numbness down the right side of her body.
And, throughout the day, her headache got progressively worse.
Among some of the stranger symptoms were that her eyelashes on her right eye suddenly began to appear very straight months before her stroke - something which has not yet been medically linked.
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Eventually, she called her friend to say that she wasn't feeling well before feeling the sensation that her 'brain exploded'.
This horrendous sensation would be the last thing she would remember for a month.
Morgan, now aged 24, cannot use her right hand and has to use the voice typing feature on her phone.
She told NeedToKnow.co.uk: “My life has completely flipped upside down. My health was perfect before – I never had any issues.
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“I had no idea what this was before it happened. If you would have asked me ‘can someone have a stroke aged 22?’, I would have said ‘no way’."
After the stroke, Morgan had to learn how to speak, write, and walk again.
She said: “I had to re-learn everything. I had to re-learn how to walk. I had to re-learn how to speak properly. I had to re-learn how to write with my left hand."
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When she was 18 years old, she was diagnosed with an arteriovenous malformation (AVM).
According to National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, AVMs are 'abnormal, snarled tangles of blood vessels that cause multiple irregular connections between your arteries and veins'.
Morgan, who is from New Jersey but has since moved to Arizona, had fallen and hit her head at school.
She went to the hospital after waking up with paralysis on her right side, where she was told she had an AVM and had also suffered three brain aneurysms - but doctors were 'too scared to touch it' due to it being in the middle of her brain.
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Morgan said: “They told me to go home and live life, and that’s what I did for five years.”
After her stroke, the 24-year-old underwent brain surgery to remove the AVM from her brain, with about 75 percent of it being extracted.
She said: “Mentally, I think I did phenomenally. More than half of people who have a traumatic brain injury face depression, anxiety, or stress, but I was super positive.
“Of course, there were days when I was sad, but the next day, I was positive. I just had to get out of my funk.”
Nonetheless, Morgan still leads a full and active life.
“I'm outside hiking, I'm volunteering at the Sedona Heritage Museum, I'm doing yoga, and more," she said.
"I am happy that my life changed after the stroke. Life is much simpler now. It's not all this hustle and bustle, this go-go-go that I was chasing.”
Kit Roberts