The click was the first sign that something had gone terribly wrong.
Sitting in a chiropractic clinic in Wellington, 29-year-old Jenay Stanbridge just wanted relief from a persistent neck ache. Returning for a quick fix after a visit two days prior, a sudden adjustment altered her life forever.
“she made the click” Jenay recalls. “And then my eyes went blurry...straight away”
Within minutes, she felt nauseous and was vomiting in the bathroom, assuming it was food poisoning. Her dad arrived 15 minutes later to find her unable to walk in a straight line, rushing her from Kenepuru Community Hospital to Wellington Hospital.
At 3:00 AM, nearly twelve hours later, scans delivered a devastating reality, the neck adjustment had caused a cervical artery dissection, triggering an ischaemic stroke.
A life built on full momentum
A wellington local of Ngāti Porou and Ngāi Tūhoe descent was a self-confessed workaholic in Wellington, balancing a youth support job with Oranga Tamariki while studying childcare.
As Stanbridge reflects on her life before, “I loved working, I loved family time, friends, anything to do with the outdoors.”
At 29, Stanbridge had just bought her first home, living a fast-paced, independent life, enjoying things like going to the ocean and diving into rock pools or running up Mount Victoria twice a day.
When the diagnosis came, Jenay’s initial reaction was disbelief masked by laughter.
“I started laughing,” she says. I was like, well, it’s over and done with. Let’s move on. Live your best life. And my dad started swearing. He was hysterical. He said he wasn’t angry at me. He was just angry because his 29-year-old daughter, his baby daughter, had a stroke."
By Saturday evening in her hospital bed, streaming rugby, the physical reality hit. Ten minutes after her mother left, sudden paralysis swept her right side. Her arm went numb, and unable to speak, she used her left hand to strike her numb side to alert the nurse.
“I couldn’t feel my body,” Jenay recalls. “I could hear people, I could hear my sister, my brother, and then my mum and dad...and that’s when I realised...this is really bad.”
The weeks following stripped away her independence. Unable to swallow, she spent a month and a half on thick liquids and yogurt, requiring nurses for basic hygiene before eventually moving back home.
A stark reality for young Māori
Jenay’s story highlights a critical message, stroke is not something that happens later in life.
While strokes affect roughly 9,000 New Zealanders annually, according to Stroke Aotearoa figures, 60% of strokes impacting Māori and Pacific peoples occur between ages 15 and 64 compared to just 20% among other ethnicities. On average, Māori and Pacific whānau experience stroke 15 years earlier.
As Hera Williams, Team Lead of Stroke Aotearoa’s Māori Partnerships team, notes:
“There’s this perception that stroke is only for our kaumātua, kuia...stroke can happen at any time to anyone,”
“a young rangatahi, a young person can have a stroke being physically healthy.”
As Stanbridge’s experience shows, warning signs can strike fast, including sudden blurred vision, pressure, and nausea following neck movement, or a rapid onset of dizziness, loss of balance, and one-sided numbness.
Williams says, “The main effects can be blood pressure, high blood pressure, diabetes, smoking.”
“90% of strokes are preventable, and it is really critical that our whānau get their blood pressures checked.”
To combat these disparities, Stroke Aotearoa has launched a Māori partnerships team focused on building iwi connections, educating rangatahi, and bringing whānau voices to the table to design preventive solutions.
Looking Ahead
Jenay’s energy is now channeled completely into healing.
Her daily life is a structured commitment to physical rehabilitation. She works out almost every single day, using balance exercises, dumbbells, and long walks to keep her body moving.
While not yet back at youth support mahi, she has adapted in unexpected ways. Taught by her mother, Jenay took up crocheting, a pastime she hopes to turn into a small business. She also uses her Instagram page, @fckstroke, to document the raw reality of her rehabilitation.
She shares “My motivation to share my journey is rewarding, to help myself and other people as well.”
Her long-term goals are to travel the world, return to full-time work, and step back into the gym on her own terms.
“It’s hard, but I’m getting there, I can see the good part coming,” she says. “It’s not here yet, but it’s going to come.”
