Paralympian Undergoes Emergency Surgery While Visiting Dad in Hospital

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Paralympian Hunter Woodhall is in recovery mode.

The gold medalist recently shared his trip to visit his dad Steve Woodhall—who’s recovering from open heart surgery—took a surprise turn, as he also ended up having a health scare that required an emergency operation. 

“Came to Utah to spend time with my dad after his open heart surgery,” Hunter wrote on his Instagram Stories March 4, which sees a photo of him in a hospital room. “Yesterday I had horrible stomach pain, turns out I have to get [my] appendix removed. So, we will be recovering together.”

The 26-year-old shared another photo of him heading to surgery, before confirming the procedure “went well” in a following video. He further joked about becoming an unexpected hospital patient, adding, “I’m straight. I didn’t need that appendix s--t anyways.” 

Hunter—who scored gold at the 2024 Paris Paralympics—then talked about the entire ordeal in a March 5 Instagram video, and he specifically thanked a special jewel for saving his life that day: his oura ring. He explained that after he bought some clothes to practice on the field, he ate a blue cheese salad and later experienced pain in his stomach.  

“I got COVID right before the Paralympics [last year], and it gave me this weird intolerance to different kinds of lactose,” Hunter, who’s married to Olympic track star Tara Davis-Woodhall, added. “I figured it was the cheese on my salad, but this was so much worse than anything I have ever experienced.”

Hunter noted that he dealt with the pain until the next morning, when he noticed an alarming symptom notification on his health ring.

“This instantly caught me off guard,” he said of the red alert, which told him his “resting heart rate and body temperature” had increased beyond his normal range. “Knowing the pain was in my right abdomen, I searched what the symptoms was for appendicitis, and all those symptoms lined up to what the ring was saying.”

The track star then headed to the hospital, where the doctors noticed his appendix was enlarged through a CT scan. Hunter ended the clip by showing his “three new incision” scars on his abdomen, before confirming his dad was also in great spirits from his own surgery. 

RONALD WITTEK/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

And while Hunter is recovering with his dad, his wife Tara is already gearing up to be his bedside partner. Shortly after his update video, the 25-year-old track star shared on her Instagram Stories that she booked a flight to Utah to see him. 

Keep reading to see other celebrities who've publicly talked about their health scares….

Instagram / Christy Carlson Romano

Christy Carlson Romano's Eye Injury

The Even Stevens alum shared in February 2025 that she was shot in the face while on a trip to shoot clay pigeons to celebrate husband Brendan Rooney's birthday.

"There was another party with us and they unsafely fired in the wrong direction and shot me in the face," she wrote on Instagram. "@thebrendanrooney immediately sprung into action, assessed me, and rushed me to the hospital. I was hit in 5 places, one was less than an inch from hitting me directly in my right eye."

The Kim Possible alum continued, "Unfortunately a fragment got lodged behind my eye and it is too risky to remove surgically at this time. Doctors will continue to monitor me (I can see normally at the moment)."

The actress said she was grateful to be alive. "I love my daughters, husband, family, and friends so much," she said. "I saw my life flash before my eyes and I’m telling you, hug the people around you every chance you can. Life can change in an instant."

Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images

Amy Schumer’s Cushing Syndrome

While the internet isn't always a kind place, Amy Schumer is happy that, in this case, it helped her get answers.

"The internet really came for me after doing a bunch of press, and I was like, 'OK everybody, relax,'" Amy recalled of her "puffier" face on a January 2025 episode of Call Her Daddy. "But then doctors were chiming in in the comments and they were like, 'No no, we think something’s really up. Your face looks so crazy that we think something’s up. And I’m like, ‘Wait, I’m getting trolled by doctors?’"

After these doctors said they thought she had Cushing syndrome and that it may be caused by spiking coritsol levels or steroid injections, the Life & Beth creator thought, "Wait, I have been getting steroid injections in my scars."

"I had a breast reduction, a C-section, whatever, and so I was getting these steroid injections," Amy said. "So it gave me this thing called Cushing syndrome, which I wouldn’t have known if the internet hadn’t come for me so hard."

Toda, Amy is just relieved she's OK. As she shared in a February 2024 News Not Noise newsletter, "Finding out I have the kind of Cushing that will just work itself out and I'm healthy was the greatest news imaginable."

Instagram

Hailey Bieber's Blood Clot

Hailey Bieber had the "scariest moment" of her life when she was having breakfast with husband Justin Bieber and started experiencing stroke-like symptoms in March 2022.

"Justin was like, 'Are you OK?'" the Rhode skincare mogul shared a month later on YouTube, "and I just didn't respond because I wasn't sure. And then he asked me again and when I went to respond, I couldn't speak. The right side of my face started drooping. I couldn't get a sentence out."

While Hailey said the facial drooping stopped and her speech came back, she went to the hospital to make sure she was OK.

"They did some scans and they were able to see that I had suffered a small blood clot to my brain," the model added, "which they labeled and categorized as something called a TIA [Transient Ischemic Attack]."

Later, Hailey went to the University of California, Los Angeles, where she found out she had a hole in her heart called a patent foramen ovale (PFO).

She explained the blood clot had traveled into her heart, "escaped" through the hole and went to her brain, leading to the TIA.

Hailey said she had a successful PFO closure procedure and was now feeling great.

Instagram / Justin Bieber

Justin Bieber's Ramsay Hunt Syndrome

The same year

Hailey had her health scare, Justin experienced one of his own.

In June 2022, the "Baby" singer shared he was diagnosed with Ramsay Hunt syndrome, a condition that caused temporary paralysis to parts of his face and forced him to cancel the remainder of his Justice World Tour.

"It is from this virus that attacks the nerve in my ear and my facial nerves and has caused my face to have paralysis," Justin explained in an Instagram video at the time. "As you can see, this eye is not blinking. I can't smile on this side of my face. This nostril will not move. So, there's full paralysis on this side of my face."

In fact, he told his followers it had gotten "progressively harder to eat." But after a while, the paralysis went away.

"He's doing really well," Hailey said on a June 2022 episode of Good Morning America, later adding, "He's feeling a lot better. Obviously, it was just a very scary and random situation to happen, but he's going to be totally OK and I'm just grateful that he's fine." 

Joe Maher/Getty Images

Jamie Foxx's Brain Bleed & Stroke

While Jamie Foxx initially kept details of his April 2023 hospitalization private, he later opened up about what he went through.

One day in Atlanta, "I was having such a bad headache, so I asked my boy, I said, ‘Listen, I need an aspirin,’” the Oscar winner said in his 2024 Netflix special What Had Happened Was... “Before I could get the Aspirin, I went out. I don’t remember 20 days.”

Jamie said he was initially taken to a doctor who gave him a cortisone shot and then sent him home. However, his concerned sister Deidra Dixon then drove him to a hospital, where they got an answer: He had a brain bleed that led to a stroke.

Twenty days after undergoing an operation, the Django Unchained woke up May 4 in a wheelchair and couldn’t walk. He then went to Chicago for rehabilitation and therapy.

"All I can tell you is that I appreciate every prayer,” he said, “because I needed every prayer.”

ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images

Emilia Clarke's Brain Aneurysm

Emilia Clarke filmed battle scenes for Game of Thrones, but in 2019, she published an essay in The New Yorker titled "A Battle for My Life."

Having a bad headache at the gym, "I reached the toilet, sank to my knees, and proceeded to be violently, voluminously ill," the actress wrote. "Meanwhile, the pain—shooting, stabbing, constricting pain—was getting worse. At some level, I knew what was happening: my brain was damaged."

She was taken to the hospital for a brain scan.

"The diagnosis was quick and ominous: a subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a life-threatening type of stroke, caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain," the Emmy nominee added. "I’d had an aneurysm, an arterial rupture."

Emilia had immediate surgery to seal the aneurysm, calling the pain "unbearable." While she was recovering, she continued, she experienced aphasia and was "muttering nonsense."

A week later, "the aphasia passed," Emilia added, and she left the hospital a month after being admitted.

At a 2013 brain scan, she learned a growth "doubled in size" and that she needed surgery again.

"When they woke me, I was screaming in pain," she wrote. "The procedure had failed. I had a massive bleed and the doctors made it plain that my chances of surviving were precarious if they didn’t operate again. This time they needed to access my brain in the old-fashioned way—through my skull."

Thankfully, Emilia shared, she's now "at a hundred per cent."

Chris Haston/WBTV via Getty Images

Cori Broadus's Stroke

Snoop Dogg's daughter Cori Broadus is grateful for her family.

Because after she suffered a "severe stroke" in January 2024, her loved ones rushed to be by her side.

"I texted them that I just had a stroke and sent them a picture," she told E! News correspondent Will Marfuggi in December 2024. "Everybody just came to my rescue."

Because of other medical concerns, Cori ended up staying in the hospital longer than she initially expected.

"I could have went home after my stroke, but my lupus wasn't doing so well," the Snoop's Fatherhood: Cori and Wayne's Story star continued. "
My kidneys were failing. It was a lot going on."

Today, Cori is on the mend.

"I'm doing great," she added. "I just had a little bit of motor skills that I had to work back on. But other than that, I was fine."

Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images for Vanity Fair

Shailene Woodley's Health Battle

Shailene Woodley’s early 20s were not an easy time health-wise.

“It got to the point where I was losing my hearing. I couldn’t walk for longer than five minutes at a time without having to lay down for hours, and hours and sleep. Everything I ate hurt my stomach,” the actress said on a September 2024 episode of the SHE MD Podcast. “It was this conflation of issues and diagnoses and different doctors telling me different things.”

So Shailene—who chose to keep the exact condition private—set out to find answers.

“I come from a very holistic background and study herbalism,” she added. “So I was very keen on, ‘I’m going to work with real MDs, [and] I’m also going to work with independent kind of healers.’ Just trying to search for some sense of comfort in my own skin.”

It was a long journey—one that lasted for 10 years.

“Throughout that decade, a lot of other things came from feeling so much discomfort physically,” the Big Little Lies star noted, “which was, ‘My gosh, if everything I eat hurts my stomach, I’m now suddenly afraid of food.’ And then going into the kind of mental f--ckery that can happen with that of body dysmorphia and confusion about identity and feeling safe in my own capsule, in my own skin, what that meant, and what that should be.”

After tending to both her physical and mental health, Shailene is feeling much better.

“It was a journey that ultimately physically resolved itself, and I am very healthy,” she shared. “I’m so happy to be able to say that."

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