Actress Sharon Stone has revealed that back in 2001 when she was suffering from brain hemorrhage, the doctors thought she was faking the whole incident. During her 2001 incident, the actress was diagnosed with 1 per cent chance of survival, which led her to quit Hollywood.
The ‘Basic Instinct’ star, 65, recalled the incident during an interview with Vogue where she remembered being rushed to the hospital after feeling a “lightning bolt-like” pain in her head as per People.
“I remember waking up on a gurney and asking the kid wheeling it where I was going, and him saying, ‘brain surgery,’” shared Stone. “A doctor had decided, without my knowledge or consent, that he should give me exploratory brain surgery and sent me off to the operating room.”
Continuing, the ‘Total Recall’ actress said: “What I learned through that experience is that in a medical setting, women often just aren’t heard, particularly when you don’t have a female doctor.”
She said that as a result of the medical staff taking the situation very lightly, they first missed her brain hemorrhage. “They missed it with the first angiogram and decided that I was faking it.”
Nonetheless, Stone’s best friend was by her side and advocated for her. “My best friend talked them into giving me a second one and they discovered that I had been hemorrhaging into my brain, my whole subarachnoid pool, and that my vertebral artery was ruptured,” Stone said. “I would have died if they had sent me home.”
After her hospital stay, she struggled to walk and lost a significant amount of weight. “I bled so much into my subarachnoid pool (head, neck, and spine) that the right side of my face fell, my left foot was dragging severely, and I was stuttering very badly.”
It was only two decades later that Stone opened up on her health condition. Describing why she did not want her condition to be publicised, she said: “I hid my disability. I was afraid to go out and didn’t want people to know. I just thought no one would accept me.”
Stone told People that she’s “become more comfortable with publicly saying what’s really happened to me, adding, “For a long time I wanted to pretend that I was just fine.”
