Sharon Stone

If anyone ever says Sharon Stone to me, I automatically think of that scene. She’s sitting in a chair. Apparently wearing no pants. Crosses her legs.

That’s all I remember, in fact I didn’t even recall the name of the film until I looked it up!

Haven’t really thought about her since.

Turns out, her story was a surprise when I looked her up. In 2001 she had a brain aneurysm, where an artery in the brain starts to bleed out.

Her brain artery bled for nine days before she went to the hospital.

After being diagnosed she suffered massive weight loss, confusion, stuttering, numbness, seizures, depression, occasional unconsciousness, dizziness, immobility.

She said

“I felt myself do this sweep upwards and there was just this tunnel of light. At the top of it was kind of a hole and several people that I had been very close to…were kind of looking down like this through that open hole at the top and looking at me and I felt like they were kind of telling me this is all great, this is all fine, this is going to be wonderful, and I felt like oh! I’m going to be with you guys, okay!”

But she lived. She spent many months in hospital and when released she was offered no rehabilitation, which nowadays happens automatically.

She goes onto say

“I think many people identify with their illness as ‘I am this thing,’ and it cannot be your identity,” says Stone. “In my case, so much was taken from me. I lost custody of my child, I lost my career and was not able to work, I was going through a divorce and being put through the ringer, I lost so much, and I could have allowed that to define me. But you have to stand up and say, ‘Okay, that happened, and now what? What am I made of?’”

She ended up losing her place in Hollywood and it’s been reported that they didn’t show a huge amount of support in her recovery.

But she’s been painting all her life. In the pandemic when we were all forced to stay at home, for Sharon, painting became an obsession. She has since exhibited her work in Los Angeles and Kentucky and she talks of becoming an artist now, full time…