Ben Williams
For most people, cracking your neck feels like a harmless little release, but for one young paramedic, what started as a simple neck crack turned into something she never imagined.
In 2019, Natalie Kunicki, then 23, had just finished a night out with friends and was unwinding at home watching movies in bed. She stretched her neck and heard a loud crack.
At first, she brushed it off, even when her mate asked if that noise really came from her neck.
Natalie said: “All my joints crack quite a bit, so I didn’t think anything of it. I just laughed.”
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15 minutes later, she went to get up to use the bathroom, but her leg wouldn’t move. Natalie collapsed to the floor.
It was only then that the shocking reality began to unfold.
Natalie, who works for the London Ambulance Service, had unknowingly ruptured her vertebral artery, one of the major arteries in the neck.
A blood clot formed in her brain, cutting off oxygen and triggering a stroke.
She said: “People need to know that even if you’re young, something this simple can cause a stroke.”
Natalie admitted she was hesitant to ring 999 because she didn’t want a crew she knew to show up and find her ‘tipsy’.
She explained: “I was trying to call 999, but I was dithering about it. There was a high chance the crew who turned up would be my friends, and I didn’t want them to see me tipsy.”
Natalie added: “I think they did look at me at first like they thought I was just a classic drunk 23-year-old, but I told them I was a paramedic and I knew something was wrong.”
After being taken to hospital, doctors confirmed what had happened - Natalie’s vertebral artery had burst, causing the stroke.
She was rushed into a three-hour surgery, where surgeons managed to repair the artery using a stent, though the clot in her brain couldn’t be fully cleared.
She said: “I expected to wake up from this miracle surgery and everything would be fixed, but my mobility was worse, and they couldn’t clear the clot.”
Her left side was partially paralyzed by the stroke.
Natalie shared further: “At the start, I couldn’t move my thumb and forefinger. I could kind of move my wrist up and down. I couldn’t lift my arm. I could bend my left leg, but I couldn’t wiggle my toes.”
After months of rehabilitation, she was able to recovered movement in her left side, though she cannot walk 'for more than five minutes'.
Determined to raise awareness about strokes in young people, Natalie said: “Mine was one in a million, but a ruptured vertebral artery is actually quite a common cause of strokes in young people… they will be in the gym or doing something quite physical, and it happens. Strokes are also quite common in kids.”