Sharon Stone Says Doctors ‘Missed’ Diagnosing Her Brain Hemorrhage Because Staff Thought She Was ‘Faking’

When Sharon Stone suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2001, doctors thought she was “acting,” she said in a recent interview.

In 2001, the Emmy winner suffered a stroke that led to a nine-day brain bleed and resulted in a 1% chance of survival, prompting her to take a break from Hollywood.

In an interview with Voguethe Basic instinct star, 65, recalled how she was rushed to hospital after experiencing a “lightning-like” pain in her head.

“I remember waking up on the gurney and asking the kid driving him where I was going and he said ‘brain surgery,'” Stone said. “The doctor decided, without my knowledge or consent, that I needed to have exploratory brain surgery and sent me into the operating room.”

The casino the star continued, “What I learned through that experience is that in the medical environment, women often just don’t get heard, especially when you don’t have a female doctor.”

As a result of the medical staff not taking her pain seriously, they first missed her brain bleed. “They missed it with the first angiogram and thought I was faking it,” she said.

Sharon Stone attends The Hollywood Reporter Raising Our Voices DEIA Luncheon at Wallis Annenberg GenSpace on May 31, 2023 in Los Angeles, California.

Michael Kovac/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty

Despite this, Stone’s best friend stood by her side and stood up for her.

“My best friend talked them into giving me another one and they found out I had a brain bleed, a whole subarachnoid pool and a ruptured vertebral artery,” Stone said. “I would die if they sent me home.”

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Her road to recovery after treatment was not easy.

After her hospital stay, she had difficulty walking and lost a significant amount of weight. “I was bleeding so much into my subarachnoid pool (head, neck and spine) that the right side of my face was drooping, my left foot was dragging a lot and I was stuttering a lot,” Stone said. Vogue.

Early in her recovery, she stuttered, couldn’t see properly and suffered memory loss, Stone told PEOPLE earlier this month.

During her recovery, she would get “weird knots like knuckles” all over the top of her head, which she likened to a “punch” sensation. She repeated that the level of pain was indescribable.

Two decades later, she went public with her health scares, noting Vogue that she is worried about the public’s reaction.

Sharon Stone attends the Tod’s fashion show during Milan Fashion Week Womenswear Spring/Summer 2024 on September 22, 2023 in Milan, Italy.

Daniele Venturelli/WireImage

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She admitted that she was “hiding” her disability. “[I] he was afraid to come out and didn’t want people to find out,” she said. “I just thought no one would accept me.”

Stone told PEOPLE that she “became more comfortable saying publicly what really happened to me, adding, ‘For a long time, I wanted to pretend I was fine.’

Sharon Stone and Dr. Michael Lawton of the Barrow Neurological Institute.

Brandon Sullivan

She mentioned that the fear for her health greatly affected her and that she is not “employed often” because she is “an employed disabled person”.

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Stone is now on the board of the Barrow Neurological Foundation, which supports a medical institute run by Stone’s brain surgeon Dr. Michael Lawton in Arizona.

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Source: HIS Education