Sharon Stone shares brutal side effects of quitting cannabis and stroke medication against doctors’ orders
Topics: Health, Mental Health, Celebrity, Entertainment
Jen Thomas
Featured Image Credit: JC Olivera/Variety via Getty Image
Topics: Health, Mental Health, Celebrity, Entertainment
Hollywood superstar Sharon Stone has revealed she went against her doctors' orders and quit her stroke medication and cannabis.
The Basic Instinct star has now opened up about the harsh side effects she experienced.
It hopefully goes without saying, but do not take any of this as medical advice and you should always speak to your GP or medical team before stopping any medication.
Stone, 68, suffered a near-fatal stroke back in 2001 and was then put on a cocktail of medications in the wake of it.
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She was initially given a 1% chance of survival after her brain haemorrhage, and her recovery took seven years and she was never the same after it.
She told Variety that she decided enough was enough, and said she wanted a 'drug-free life'.
Stone explained: “I got off one of my medications that I was on for my stroke last September, and they said I couldn’t go off of it."
She confessed her medical team said she could 'never' go off the medication, but she insisted.
The actress has likened the process of coming off of the medication as like going off 'heroin'.
"I was sick as a frigging dog for four and a half months," she admits.
"I just thought, ‘I want my life back.’ I had gotten off the majority of the drugs over the years that they had put me on. But I was like, ‘I want a drug-free life.’”
After successfully quitting the stroke medication, she decided to give up cannabis next.
"When I stopped smoking pot, I also got sick. It’s not like you’re pulling it out of the ground anymore. It’s not like when we were kids," she said.
"I got pretty sick for a month. I went to my neurologist, and he said, ‘Sharon, I’ve had people dying in the emergency room from marijuana.’”
Following her recovery from the stroke, she told The Hollywood Reporter: "I had a death experience and then they brought me back. I bled into my brain for nine days, so my brain was shoved to the front of my face."
"It wasn’t positioned in my head where it was before. And while that was happening, everything changed. My sense of smell, my sight, my touch. I couldn’t read for a couple of years. Things were stretched and I was seeing color patterns."
She has since turned her hand to art, and painting, and finds great joy in her work.
Stone got the painting bug over the Coronavirus lockdown, and it wasn't long before she transformed her bedroom into an art studio.
Her sons Roan, Laird and Quinn, intervened and persuaded her to move the studio to the guest house after she moved all of her bedroom furniture out of the room.
The star says she would also love to act on Broadway.
She added: "This has been a period for me in this last year of really reclaiming my life.”