A yawn left a 36-year-old mother fighting for her life. Hayley Black from Milton Keynes told Daily Mail she had just woken to make a bottle for her baby when she saw her daughter yawn and instinctively copied her. The stretch snapped something deep inside her neck.
“I felt this immediate electric shock sensation go through half my body, and I jumped up in shock,” she said. Her arm froze mid-air. “It was like having a seizure down half of my body. I knew instantly something was dreadfully wrong.”
At first, doctors didn’t believe her. Scans came back clean while she screamed through the pain. Black said she was hitting herself in the head, trying to knock herself out just to escape it. Hours later, further imaging revealed the truth. “The C6 and C7 had shot forward into my spine when I yawned due to the force of the yawn,” she recalled. “They said it was such a freak incident.”
Young Woman Yawns So Strongly That She Breaks Her Neck
Surgeons warned her family the odds were brutal—50/50 on survival and the same for walking again. An emergency discectomy and fusion saved her, but the recovery was far from easy. She spent six months in a wheelchair, re-learning how to walk. A tracheal scar still marks where doctors operated. Fibromyalgia, diagnosed later, now leaves her in constant pain. “I often get pains going down my arms, shooting down my back and up into my neck and my head,” she said. Missing medication means every step sends electric shocks through her spine.
Black first shared her story on TikTok with the caption “I broke my neck yawning.” The clip has since been removed, but her words still ricochet across social media. “I can’t yawn without panic, and any yawn I try to stifle—it still affects me to this day,” she told Daily Mail.
The injury also broke her family financially. Her husband became her carer, they slipped into homelessness, and work is still unstable. Yet she’s blunt about what the experience taught her. “You don’t have to be a hero or an inspiration—you get through each day how you can,” she said. And her warning for anyone caught in unexplained agony is simple: trust yourself.
The post Mother of 2 Yawned So Hard She Broke Her Neck appeared first on VICE.
