While viewers were writing laudatory reviews of the actress’s performance in Basic Instinct, she herself was in the hospital. In 2001, Sharon Stone suffered a stroke that resulted in a cerebral hemorrhage; with such a diagnosis, she noted, only 1% of patients survive. The star did not hide her health problems then, but she still refrained from going into details because she was afraid of the public’s reaction.
In an interview with British Vogue, Sharon said that it all started with an unbearable headache. She woke up as one of the doctors at a Los Angeles hospital was wheeling her into the operating room on a gurney to open her brain to check what was going wrong. Having found out what was happening, Sharon created a scandal at the hospital, demanding to be listened to. “So I learned that in medical institutions women are often simply not heard, especially when there is no female doctor nearby,” the actress said.
Specialists also checked the condition of her blood vessels and initially found nothing suspicious. But later, a friend of the actress persuaded the doctors to do an angiography again – and that’s how they found out that the cause of the hemorrhage was a rupture of the vertebral artery. This often happens due to injury, but it is rarely due to genetics.
The consequences of what happened were irreversible. Sharon has since learned to walk without a limp, but still stutters and suffers from headaches. Only medications help to cope.