A 36-year-old woman in the UK almost lost her life after yawning so forcefully one morning that she broke her neck and required emergency surgery.

Hayley Black had just woken up one morning to heat her daughter Amelia a bottle of formula when she saw the baby yawning and instinctively followed her example. It was a casual thing, but the 36-year-old mother instantly felt an “electric shock sensation” shoot through her body, leaving her arm stuck in the air. Black immediately realized that something was wrong, so she asked her husband, Ian, to call an ambulance. When she arrived at the hospital in Milton Keynes, she was in excruciating pain, but doctors struggled to understand what was going on because their scans didn’t really show anything. It was only after taking scans of the woman’s neck that they realized the C6 and C7 bones in her neck had “shot forward into her spine”.