By Comfort Asemota
Supermodel Anok Yai, recently named the Fashion Awards’ 2025 Model of the Year, has revealed that she has been silently battling a congenital defect affecting her heart and lungs.
The 28-year-old model shared a candid post on Instagram, describing how the condition had progressed over the past year. “For the past year, I’ve been dealing with this silent battle. I incidentally found out I had a congenital defect overworking my heart and slowly destroying my lungs,” she wrote, alongside photos and videos from her hospital stay.
Yai, the first Black model to open a Prada runway show, explained that what began as a minor issue gradually escalated into more serious symptoms. “What started as something asymptomatic for the majority of my life turned into a lingering cough, which turned to chest pains, bouts of coughing up blood, then at times struggling to breathe,” she said.
She added, “I’ve always thought I could outwork or outrun anything, but the universe has a way of slowing you down and waking you up.”
The model recently underwent robotic lung surgery, a minimally invasive procedure used to remove diseased lung tissue, performed by Dr. Robert Cerfolio and his team. She described the operation as a success, expressing gratitude to the doctors and medical staff who discovered and treated her condition before it became more severe.
“Thank you to Dr. Harmik Soukiasian and everyone at @beverlyhillsconciergehealth for discovering my condition. Thank you to all the doctors and amazing nurses at @nyulangone. And thank you to my friends and family for being the first thing I saw when I woke up,” Yai wrote.
She concluded with a message of resilience: “For now I’m healing… but I’ll be back. See ya.”
