Hayley Black: UK mother left paralysed after morning yawn crushes spine, facing life threatening surgery

Most near-death stories involve chaos or catastrophe. For this young mother, it was a single, ordinary reflex that turned her life upside down, leaving her paralysed and fearing for her life.

Hayley Black, 36, had woken up to make her newborn daughter a bottle, without thinking twice, and the mother yawned not expecting it to send the feeling of an “electric shock” through half her body.

“Most people start their day with a big yawn and you’d never expect it to end up the way it did for me,” Ms Black said.

“I instinctively yawned and stretched, and straight away I felt this immediate electric shock sensation go through half my body.”

The former emergency call handler from Milton Keynes said she leapt up in shock but realised she couldn’t move properly, The Sun reported.

She continued: “My arm got stuck in the air, and I was having these electric spark sensations.

“It was like a seizure down half of my body.

“I knew instantly something was dreadfully wrong.”

Her husband initially thought she was overreacting, telling her that it was 5am and that it was probably nothing.

Ms Black insisted he call the ambulance. When emergency services arrived, the crew immediately immobilised Ms Black with head blocks and rushed her to the hospital. Ms Black described her pain as “unbearable”

“The journey was excruciating. Every bump in the road felt like my spine was being ripped apart,” she said.

Adding to the stress of the situation, doctors and emergency crews were stumped when Ms Black was examined, not being able to identify exactly what was causing the excruciating pain.

She said: “Nobody was listening to me and I was screaming in pain all night.

“I was trying to hit myself in the head to knock myself out because I was in so much pain.

“The nurses were getting frustrated with me and telling me there was nothing on the scans — but I knew I wasn’t okay.”

Eventually, after extensive testing, it was revealed that two vertebrae in her neck, the C6 and C7, had shot forward into her spinal cord from the force of her yawn, resulting in her spine being crushed.

“I was completely paralysed down my right-hand side,” Ms Black recalled.

“The surgeon told my mum it was worse than they had thought. They gave me a 50/50 chance — not just of walking again, but of surviving the surgery at all.”

Her last memory before the operation was her mum at her bedside.

She said: “I remember my mum being there while they put me to sleep.

“When I woke up, I’d had emergency surgery and they told me they’d managed to restore all my functions.

“It was amazing, but I was still in shock. I kept thinking, ‘I broke my neck yawning, how is that even possible?’”

Surgeons removed the damaged discs and fused her neck with a metal plate, leaving her with a tracheal scar.

“I had to re-learn how to walk,” she said.

“I spent months in a wheelchair.

“The recovery was long, both physically and emotionally. It took me a long time to get my head around what had happened.”

The ordeal turned her family’s life upside down.

Hayley added: “My husband became essentially a single parent and my carer overnight.

“It was really hard, we even became homeless because of it.

“I couldn’t work, I couldn’t care for the children, and our whole world turned upside down.”

The sun reported that although the surgery did save her life, the damage was irreversible.

“I take medication daily to manage it,” she explained.

“If I don’t, then every time I take a step I get electrical shocks all up my spine and through into my head.”

Ms Black explained how she also developed fibromyalgia, which causes chronic pain and fatigue.

“I often get pains shooting down my arms, up into my neck and head. If I overdo it, the pain flares up for days,” Ms Black said.

“I can’t go to exercise classes or run around with my children.

“Every time I try to go back to work, I end up needing so much time off sick that I either lose the job or have to walk away.”

Even everyday reflexes now fill her with fear.

“I can’t yawn without panic. Every time I feel one coming, I try to stifle it. It still affects me every single day,” she revealed.