Aubrey Plaza Says She ‘Forgot How to Talk’ After Suffering a Stroke at 20

Aubrey Plaza opened up about the terrifying side effects she suffered from having a stroke at age 20.

“It just happened,” the Megalopolis star said during a Wednesday, September 11 appearance on The Howard Stern Show per Delaware Online. “That’s when I was paralyzed, but only really for a minute or something. I lost my motor skills really briefly. The freakiest thing was I forgot how to talk.”

Plaza shared that the health scare was a “wild” experience especially since it came out of nowhere.

“It happened mid-sentence,” she recalled. “I took the train to Astoria to have lunch with my friends and I walked into their apartment ― I hadn’t even taken my jacket off.”

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This isn’t the first time Plaza has been candid about having a stroke. In August 2017, she shared how her friends initially thought she was joking around but Plaza was able to signal she needed help.

“I think [my friends] thought I was making a joke … I was always doing something stupid,” she said in an interview with NPR’s Fresh Air. “But then after a couple of minutes, they kept saying, ‘Do you want us to call an ambulance?’ and I was aware enough to shake my head yes. I kept just shaking my head yes because I knew something was really, really wrong. But I didn’t know what it was.”

Once paramedics arrived to treat Plaza, they initially did not believe she was having a stroke because she was so young.

“They were thinking that I was dehydrated. And I really think they thought I was on drugs because they kept asking me if I’d taken drugs, and I hadn’t,” she said at the time. “I hadn’t really put anything into my body that day and — except for birth control.”

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It wasn’t until Plaza met with the doctor who asked the actress to place her “right hand on her left knee.” After Plaza wasn’t able to tell the difference between her right and her left, “everyone realized” she had a stroke. She was subsequently taken to the hospital’s stroke unit where she stayed for “a couple nights” before being transferred to a hospital in Delaware close to her family.

“There was no recovery. I mean,when you have a stroke, you have a stroke,” she reflected to NPR. “There’s nothing you can do about it. Your brain has to heal itself. And that part of the blood clot area in my brain will never be healed. It’s a tiny, little black hole in my brain. So I had some cognitive, you know, therapy that I went to. I went back to school in the fall.”