Video captures woman having stroke on TikTok Live: ‘One of the scariest things’

As Kristie Kaluza started a TikTok livestream to advertise some jewelry, she suddenly felt as if she fainted. But she remained awake and upright.

“I didn’t fall. I wasn’t on the floor, but I realized I had dropped the jewelry, and my brain was really confused,” Kaluza, 43, of El Campo, Texas tells TODAY.com. “I look up at the camera because I knew my husband was (watching), and I tried to say, ‘I need help,’ and it wouldn’t come out. I couldn’t turn my body. I felt super heavy. I couldn’t really lift my arms.” Her husband recognized that his wife was having a stroke and called 911. But when she got to the hospital, staff didn’t consider that she’d had a stroke at first.

“The people at the hospital … said, ‘You’re so young,’” she recalls. “I come to find out when we finally get to the neurologist … it was a stroke.”

An unexpected stroke

On January 10, 2025, Kaluza returned home in the early evening and prepared for a TikTok Live to sell her jewelry. She had a normal Friday until she sat down in front of the camera and started feeling strange. When she tried to speak, she couldn’t.

“There’s a miscommunication, a misfire there somewhere, and I couldn’t get out that, ‘Hey I don’t feel good,’” she says.

Luckily, her husband rushed in and recognized the signs of a stroke.

“He said, ‘I knew then something was not right,’” Kaluza says. “If he hadn’t have looked down when he did and seen that I dropped the jewelry and I wasn’t acting right, I wouldn’t have been able to call out for help.”

Soon after he called 911, Kaluza started experiencing tremors in her head and hands.

“That was one of the scariest things, not being able to say my words and not having control of my head or my hands,” she says.

Bradley Kaluza, her husband, knew the signs of stroke because his mother recently experienced one.

According to the American Stroke Association, the signs of stroke, which spell out FAST, are:

• F: Facial drooping
• A: Arm weakness
• S: Slurred or impaired speech
• T: Time — the faster one gets help, the better the outcome.

While Kaluza arrived at the nearby hospital quickly, it didn’t have an MRI machine, so she couldn’t undergo the scan to see if she’d had a stroke. Her CT scan looked normal, but doctors transferred her to another hospital so she could get an MRI.

But that hospital wouldn’t perform an MRI because she has a spinal cord stimulator implanted in her back to relieve pain, and they worried it would be unsafe in the MRI, she says. She had the remote to put it in MRI safety mode with her, but they still refused, Kaluza adds.

The hospital injected her with a blood-thinning medication, which can break up a blood clot. She was released and underwent an outpatient MRI. The doctor who performed it determined what was wrong.

“The neurologist says, ‘Well, we see in the MRI with the contrast you had a stroke,’” Kaluza says. “My husband says, ‘Wait, you are saying she had a full-blown stroke?’ And the neurologist said, ‘Yes, she did have a small one.’”

More specifically, she’d experienced a transient ischemic attack, also known as a mini stroke, which occurs when the blockage of blood flow to the brain is brief and doesn’t cause lasting symptoms, according to the Mayo Clinic.

The neurologist sent Kaluza to a cardiologist to understand why she had a stroke at a young age. After a variety of tests, she learned she had a hole between the upper chambers of her heart, what’s known as a patent foramen ovale (PFO).

“A PFO is something we all have when we’re in our fetal development,” Dr. Daniel Hermann, director of structural cardiology at Memorial Hermann Memorial City, who treated Kaluza, tells TODAY.com.

For most people, “probably about 90-95%,” the hole closes, he says. For the remaining patients, the hole remains open. Most people are unaware of it and live a symptom-free life. But in some, like Kaluza, that opening allows a clot to pass through and cause stroke.

“For 43 years, I’ve lived with the hole in my heart and never knew, never had any symptoms,” Kaluza says. “Just a hole in (my) heart from being born caused a stroke.”

PFO treatment

While some people might experience migraines from a PFO, most people have few signs that they have one.

“It’s not something you have symptoms from,” Hermann says. “It causes no structural issues.”

When younger patients, people typically under 60, experience stroke, doctors sometimes find a PFO as the cause. Patients can take blood thinners to reduce clots, but that can cause people to bleed excessively if they injure themselves, for example. Doctors like Hermann often perform an outpatient procedure to fix the PFO instead.

“In the last decade or so, it’s become clear that the most effective way of reducing stroke risk related to a PFO is actually closing it,” he explains. “That’s typically done using a catheter-based approach.”

In the minimally invasive procedure, a doctor threads a catheter through a vein in the groin and inserts a “small plug” into the catheter, which they use to block the opening between the heart chambers.

“It’s not something that typically takes too much time and it’s something that’s very effective as far as closing the hole and preventing further strokes,” Hermann says.

Kaluza should be able to do everything she enjoys without any worry of a future stroke.

“Her risk of stroke after having this taken care of it essentially returns her back to any other person … that is of her age,” Hermann says.

Raising awareness

After Kaluza underwent her PFO closure on March 4, she has been feeling better.

“I can do everything that I could do before,” she says. 

Still, she struggles cognitively at times, and she can’t find the right words or says in the wrong order.

“When my brain works a lot … it starts to get tired,” she says.

Sometimes Kaluza wonders what would have happened if her husband didn’t see she was having a stroke.

“(It’s) very, very scary,” she says. “I don’t know how long I would have sat here not being able to move and not being able to call out (for help).”

Kaluza hopes that her story encourages others to act quickly if they see someone experiencing stroke.

“We knew what to look for and we called and got help quickly,” she says. “That’s what I want people to learn, how to look for stroke, what to do, how to get help.”