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

In a new interview with 'Vogue,' the actress revealed how she almost died after doctors didn't pay attention to her pain levels

When Sharon Stone suffered from a brain hemorrhage in 2001, the doctors thought she was “faking” it, 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 rate, leading her to take a break from Hollywood.

In an interview with Vogue, the Basic Instinct star, 65, recalled being rushed to the hospital after feeling a “lighting bolt-like” pain in her head.

“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.”

The Casino star continued, “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.”

As a result of the medical staff not seriously considering her pain, they first missed her brain hemorrhage. "They missed it with the first angiogram and decided that I was faking it," she said.

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."

Related: Sharon Stone Says Only Her Dad Came to Her Aid After She Nearly Died: 'Don't Come to Hollywood' (Exclusive)

Her path to recovery after treatment was not smooth.

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,” Stone told Vogue.

In the early stages of recovery, she stuttered, could not see correctly and suffered memory loss, Stone told PEOPLE earlier this month.

During recovery, she would get “weird knuckle-like knots” all over the top of her head, which she compared to the feeling of being “punched.” She reiterated that the level of pain was indescribable.

Two decades later, she went public with her health scares, noting to Vogue that she was worried about public reaction.

Related: Sharon Stone Says She's 'Grateful' She Didn't 'Prioritize Hollywood' Over Motherhood (Exclusive)

She confessed that she “hid” her disability. “[I] was afraid to go out and didn’t want people to know,” she said. “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.”

She noted the health scare has greatly impacted her, and she doesn't get "hired a lot" because she's a “disability hire."

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

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