Sharon Stone:
The Hollywood star reveals the harrowing details of the night family and friends rushed to her bedside as doctors fought to save her life.
The Hollywood actress recounts her life-threatening stroke
Iopened my eyes, and there he was standing over me, just inches from my face. He was stroking my head, my hair; God, he was handsome. I wished he were someone who loved me instead of someone whose next words were, “You’re bleeding into your brain.” It was late September 2001. I was in the ER at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. I asked Dr Handsome, “Will I lose my ability to speak?” He said it’s possible. I needed to call my mom and my sister. They needed to hear this from me while I could still tell them myself.
I called my sister, Kelly. She was as she always is: the most magnificent person I know. Then I called my mom, a more difficult conversation for me, since I didn’t know if she liked me very much. Here I was, dying and insecure all at the same time. She was gardening outside in her yard on top of a mountain in Pennsylvania. She fell apart.
Despite the distance between us, she and my dad arrived in under 24 hours. She ran into the hospital still in her shorts, covered in gardening mud. Years of miscommunication between us fell away in a look. As I lay there knowing that I could die at any second, she stroked my face with her dusty hand and I suddenly felt that my mother loved me.
I called my best friend of more than 20 years, Mimi, and said, “I might die and you are the only one I can tell the truth to because somebody needs to take care of everyone and it’s not going to be me.”
I said, “There is a very good-looking doctor here, and sadly I might not be able to flirt with him.”
There was a stunning lack of urgency and movement. The doctor – yeah, that one – told me an ambulance was coming to transport me to another hospital which was renowned for neurological issues.
It was then that I suddenly felt as if the film of my life were moving through a camera backward. I started to experience a feeling of falling … and then this tremendous, luminous, uplifting white-out pulling me right out of my body . . .
The light was so mystical. I wanted to immerse myself. Their faces were not just familiar. Some of them had not been gone for long. I had cared for some of them until the end of this life. They were my closest friends.
They were so warm, so happy, so welcoming. Without their saying a word, I understood everything they were telling me about why we are safe, why we should not be afraid: because we are surrounded by love.
Suddenly I felt like I had been kicked in the middle of my chest by a mule … I was awake and back in the emergency room. I had made a choice. I took the kind of gasp you take when you are underwater far too long. I sat up. All I could see was Dr Handsome, observing me.
The last few years, throughout the late nineties, I had been chasing a love I didn’t have. I chased literally – leaving Hollywood and moving to Northern California – always trying to be something more, something that would be the thing that would bring me closer to understanding how to be better at life. I was watching my own life, and suddenly it ran out right in front of me …
… one fine, pretty afternoon, all of my questions were more than answered. Without haze or pretence: The facts were just that:
I was not loved, not wanted.
In my fine and decent desire to be something more than I had been before, I had let the core me go.
Because I was a woman who had made it, very few people personally valued me for what I had done, what I had made of myself. Was I not really worth as much as a man with the same accomplishments?
I had grown up with parents who loved each other more than they were interested in their kids. Parents who we would find necking on the sofa when we came in from playing. I grew up with parents who still danced in the yard after 50 years of marriage ... I was swimming in quicksand.
Weighed down by this new knowledge, this failure, I’d walked down the hall [at home] and into the TV room, past the sofas and toward the window, wanting to look out at the garden, where I had buried the ultrasound pictures of my miscarried children under the magnolia. Without warning, it was as if Zeus himself hurled a bolt of lightning directly under the back right-hand side of my head. I was airborne, flying over the sofa, smashing into the coffee table ... as my head bounced off the floor, bearing the brunt of my fall.
Haunted by memories, I lay there, time itself floating by while I was fascinated with the fibres in the rug.
Thankfully, there was a group of San Francisco-based Irish nannies who rotated coming in to help with my son, Roan, who
I had only recently adopted, just a wee babe.
While deliriously happy to finally become a parent, already having lost three five-and-a-half-month pregnancies, I was old to be a new mom, already past 40.
During the next few days, I wandered. At some point I got into my convertible and attempted to drive myself to the hospital. I had no idea where I was, and found myself at a stop sign, my right foot totally numb.
I thought I must have anthrax poisoning, as this was just two weeks after 9/11. Fortunately someone pulled up beside me and offered to help me, guiding me home. I just sat at the dining room table, telling our nanny I had a terrible pain in my head. She told me to take some aspirin, which may have saved my life.
The next morning I started to lose body temperature. I went upstairs and lay on my heated bathroom floor. The phone rang. It was Mimi. “Mimi, help me.”
She insisted an ambulance be called. My doctor said we had a few minutes to get me to the hospital, which was just down the street, making it clear that she would be standing outside waiting. She had been my attending doctor for my miscarriages and knew the fragility of my situation.
After I first woke up, Dr Handsome told me that the transfer ambulance had arrived.
I woke up in Moffitt-Long’s neurological ICU. The sounds and lights of all those machines haven’t left me still. They are wrapped up with the memory of the televisions hanging from the ceiling, still playing the endless images of the planes flying into the Twin Towers and The Pentagon.
The next day I came to as I was being wheeled down the hall by a young male orderly. I asked where he was taking me.
“To the operating theatre.”
“For what?”
“For exploratory brain surgery.” “But no one talked to me about it.” “Oh, yeah, the papers were signed – you’re all good.”
I asked him to stop for a second. But he told me that we didn’t have time or we would lose the room. So I did what I could: I gathered myself and stood up on that moving gurney.
Nurses came running. “She doesn’t want to go to the surgery room,” the orderly announced. A nurse asked me why, and I told her that I had been signed up for exploratory brain surgery without my knowledge or consent. The nurse said she would get the doctor.
He came running, white coat flapping, and told me to do what I was told. He told us all that someone had signed all of the papers. He showed us all proudly that he was holding a fax from People magazine and said he had just spoken to them, told them of the situation, and he knew exactly what to do. (Ultimately, he had given them an incorrect diagnosis, which they ran.) He held it like a talisman, as if because it was written, it was true. Which it wasn’t, by the way. Oh, if only he had been right.
I looked at the nurse, who stared at me with the same sense of incredulity, like, this doctor is a jackass of astonishing proportions.
Still standing, ass out of my gown on the gurney, I turned to the doctor and said, “You’re fired.”
He said, “What? You can’t fire me!” and the nurse said, “Doctor, I’m afraid she just did,” and directed the orderly to take me back to my room.
That quick-thinking nurse saved my life. She was a pretty, blonde fiftysomething woman who I later realised was not dissimilar to someone I would get to be simply because she had the courage to be brave for me. To do her job with the authority and knowledge that she was the one to make that call, she stood in her dignity.
By now my entire family had rushed to the neurological unit: my mother, my father, my sister, and my brothers, Mike and Patrick. They were shocked and confused. My room became a free-for-all. Tempers were out of control. The just-fired doctor was still holding his People magazine fax. My older brother, Mike, wanted a fist fight; Kelly, who is a nurse, wanted medical facts; my friends who had arrived were like sentries, keeping the wrong people out and the right people in.
My mother was determined no one was going to . . . well, as she would say, “f**k with my kid”. She had had it. This was “too goddamn far”. She was scared. So she sat, outside the curtain. There, she sat. Purse on her lap. Tight-lipped, fierce, immobile, strong, and brittle. She guarded that spot and no one, but no one, was getting to me again until I knew and agreed.
I asked the fired flapping doctor to explain the steps of the proposed
brain surgery to me. He was profoundly offended. He felt we didn’t have time and believed I didn’t need to know. I felt I really did. Go figure.
“You shave my head and then cut the first layer of skin. Do you fold it back or remove it? Then the bone, do you remove it? Then what? How large of a section of my head will you remove? Will you cut through the nerves?”
The hospital then sent me a group of extraordinary men, a team of research doctors from the neurological unit, who talked to me about all of my options. They calmly told me that there was another neurosurgeon, but that he wasn’t there that day. I asked if we could get him on the phone. They did. The lead guy in this group, Dr Michael Lawton, explained that going with the neurosurgeon required waiting another day, as he had to fly in. I tried to get the doctors to talk odds, percentages with me. How much more would I bleed into my brain waiting these 24 hours? How much damage could that cause? Could I die or just lose some senses? If so, which?
I chose to wait for him.
The next morning that brilliant neurosurgeon walked into my life. He talked to me and my family about a relatively new process of using a camera that would go all the way through my body and up into my head and look around.
We were now on day five of my brain bleed and I had been coming and going. I had been “sleeping” more than waking. I had not eaten since the initial incident. Every time I woke up the television that hung from the ceiling blared with images of plane crashes and terror alerts.
This is where it gets weird, and I hesitate to share this with you, but I want you to believe in yourself and your instincts no matter how they come to you. So here goes.
One night I awoke to my grandmother, Lela, standing at the foot of my bed. I know that sounds reasonable, except my grandmother had been dead for 30 years. She looked beautiful. She smelled beautiful: she always wore Guerlain perfume, Shalimar. She was at her best, wearing her favourite suit and hat. She said, “We don’t really know what’s wrong with you – we are working on it. But whatever you do, don’t move your neck.”
Then she was gone.
I took the teddy bear my dad had brought me, squiggled to the side of the bed, and stuffed that bear by my neck and DID NOT MOVE. No matter what, I immobilised myself. I did not roll onto my side.
Mimi came to the hospital, because she thought I was being discharged. Until then, she had been running my household, keeping an eye on my son and the rest of my family. I whispered to her, “I’m dying! Get them to do something! I’m dying! Mimi, please help me!”
She looked at me and I could see that this was a big ask. She’s shyer than I am, which is something, as when I am not busy being Sharon Stone, I am rather shy. But she knew I was serious and she knew that I meant it. She talked to everyone, my family and friends and the doctors. She says after she pulled “a full
Shirley MacLaine” at the nurses’ station, finally everyone agreed to another angiogram.
They said it would be a 30-to-45minute procedure. For them it sounded like they had found a way to get this weird famous person out of the hospital and off their backs. Except when they went in, they found that my right vertebral artery, which is one of the two connecting your head to your back and spine, was torn to a fine shred and I was bleeding into my face, my brain, my head, and my spine. I had already had a significant stroke. My family had some hard decisions. They were faced with incomprehensible medical and ethical choices, and were told that any decision could potentially kill me on the spot.
Either way, I had a one per cent chance of survival. They stuck together, as they always do when it really matters. My father taught us a lesson early on. He said, “A family is like a hand: if one finger is cut, the whole hand bleeds.” This has served us well. Nine hours later, I left the operating chamber without a vertebral artery and with 23 platinum coils in its place.
I woke up in my room knowing my grandmother had saved my life. She had put her hand on my family and on me and guided us through. My mother had held my hand and held my face like a lioness without ever entering the operating room …
When I had been in the first emergency room and was bathed in the white light, I saw many people who had crossed over before. They told me what it would be like. I felt so safe, so immeasurably at peace, and yet I was pulled back into this life, this world. It was so confusing and harsh, and yet now I know that we are not far apart; they are not far away. We do not lose their love.
We are love.