A morning news anchor in Oklahoma suffered the “beginnings of a stroke” while reading the news live on air.
Julie Chin, a presenter for KJRH Channel 2 in Tulsa, was covering the attempted launch of Nasa’s Artemis I rocket early on Saturday morning when she began to stumble over her words.
After gracefully ducking out of the programme, she later revealed that she had been taken to hospital where doctors suspected she suffered a partial stroke.
“First of all: Thank you,” Ms Chin wrote on Facebook on Sunday. “The prayers. The concern. The messages. The texts. The emails. The calls. I’m so grateful. And I’m so glad to tell you I’m OK.
“The past few days are still a little bit of a mystery, but my doctors believe I had the beginnings of a stroke live on the air Saturday morning. Some of you witnessed it firsthand, and I’m so sorry that happened. “
“The episode seemed to have come out of nowhere. ... first, I lost partial vision in one eye. A little bit later my hand and arm went numb. Then, I knew I was in big trouble when my mouth would not speak the words that were right in front of me on the teleprompter.
“If you were watching Saturday morning, you know how desperately I tried to steer the show forward, but the words just wouldn’t come.”
Ms Chin’s colleagues quickly called emergency services, and she was taken to hospital where doctors ran tests on her and concluded she had likely suffered the start of a stroke, “but not a full stroke”.
She also warned readers to watch out for the symptoms of a stroke, giving the common public health acronym “BE FAST”: Balance (meaning a sudden loss of it, or sudden vertico), Eyes (sudden vision loss or changes), Face (which can droop or become uneven during a stroke), Speech (slurring words or struggling to speak or understand others), and Time (which is of the essence when symptoms begin).
Happily, the newsreader said she should be back at work within a few days.
