AfriPulse
By Spooky on September 25th, 2025 Category: News
A 36-year-old woman in the UK almost lost her life after yawning so forcefully one morning that she broke her neck and required emergency surgery.
Hayley Black had just woken up one morning to heat her daughter Amelia a bottle of formula when she saw the baby yawning and instinctively followed her example. It was a casual thing, but the 36-year-old mother instantly felt an “electric shock sensation” shoot through her body, leaving her arm stuck in the air. Black immediately realized that something was wrong, so she asked her husband, Ian, to call an ambulance. When she arrived at the hospital in Milton Keynes, she was in excruciating pain, but doctors struggled to understand what was going on because their scans didn’t really show anything. It was only after taking scans of the woman’s neck that they realized the C6 and C7 bones in her neck had “shot forward into her spine”.
“It was crazy. The C6 and C7 had shot forward into my spine when I yawned [due to] the force of the yawn. They said it was such a freak incident,” Hayley recalled on TikTok. “My mum told me [the doctor] said ‘it’s a 50/50 whether she’s going to walk and potentially survive.”
Luckily for the English woman, doctors were able to perform emergency surgery and prevent any serious damage, like permanent paralysis due to low oxygen levels. However, the incident did leave her with permanent nerve damage and a tracheal scar from where doctors removed the discs in her neck. She spent six months in a wheelchair and had to re-learn how to walk. Haily has also developed fibromyalgia, a long-term condition that causes chronic pain.
“I’m still struggling with the nerve damage today. I often get pains going down my arms, shooting down my back, and up into my neck and my head,” the 36-year-old said. “I can’t yawn without panic, and any yawn I try to stifle – it still affects me to this day.”
Every time Hayley Black forgets to take her medication, taking a simple step sends electrical shocks through her spine and head, but she knows things could have been much worse. A simple yawn could have put her in a wheelchair for life, so she appreciates that she has full control of her body.
Source: OddityCentral | Read the Full Story…
