[ DOWNLOAD] PDF EBOOKTHE BEAUTY OF LIVING TWICE BYSHARON STONE

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I opened my eyes, and there he was standing over me, just inches from my

face. A stranger looking at me with so much kindness that I was sure I was

going to die. 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.”

He stood there gently touching my head and I just lay there knowing that

no one in the room loved me. Knowing it in my guts—not needing my

bleeding brain to be aware of the ridiculous slap-down of my now-

immobilized life. 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 wanted a phone. I

needed to call my mom and my sister. They needed to hear this from me

while I could still tell them myself. The doctor squeezed my hand in his. I

realized he was doing his darndest to fill in with that special kind of love

that comes when someone pursues the vocation that they were meant to, if

only for moments like this. I learned a lot from him.

I called my sister, Kelly, first. She was as she always is: the most

magnificent person I know. She is kinder to others than she is to herself,

naïve in her gentleness. 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.

It’s important to consider that Dot falls apart over radio commercials, so

I waited, because, well, I knew she would pull it together. Despite the

distance between us, she and my dad arrived in under twenty-four hours.

She ran into the hospital still in her shorts, covered in gardening mud, dirt

under her nails and fear on her face. Years of uncertainty and

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. Bit by bit.

My father stood beside her like a bull looking to charge.

I called my best friend of more than twenty years, Mimi, and said what

we always said when the news was exceptionally good or bad: “You’d

better sit down.” I could hear her sharp inhale. I 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’m bleeding into my brain. They

don’t know why.”

She said, “Oh, shit.”

I said, “There is a very good-looking doctor here, and sadly I might not

be able to flirt with him.”

She was trying not to cry as she whispered, “Oh, honey, I’m on the next

plane.” As I knew she would be.

Then came the silence again. Echoing off the emergency room tiles and

hitting my newly broken heart. I remember feeling something between

scared and fascinated that no one was running around yelling, “STAT

STAT!” like they do on TV. 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, Moffitt-Long, which was renowned for

neurological issues, and that they would take special care of me.

God, that really made me feel bad. There are just times when getting

special care can be such a downer. This is not like floor seats at a Laker

game or getting the table by the window at your favorite restaurant.

Privileges. Fame. Shit.

It was then that I suddenly felt everything moving strangely, as if the

film of my life were moving through a camera backward. Fast. I started to

experience a feeling of falling, and then as though something were

overtaking me, body and soul, followed by this tremendous, luminous,

uplifting whiteout pulling me right out of my body and into a familiar

brilliant other body of...knowing?

The light was so luminous. It was so...mystical. I wanted to know it. I

wanted to immerse myself. Their faces were not just familiar. They were

transcendent. 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,

Caroline, Tony Duquette, Manuel. I had missed them so much. I felt so cold

in the room I was coming from. 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. That in fact we are love.

Suddenly I felt like I had been kicked in the middle of my chest by a

mule, the impact was so harsh, and, astoundingly, 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; the light was blinding. All I

could see was Dr. Handsome, standing back, observing me.

I had to pee so badly, but as I turned to get off the gurney, I was so high

up, like an Alice in a Wonderland of white and stainless steel.

“What do you need?” the doctor said.

“Bathroom.”

“There.”

I slipped far, farther down onto the cool tiles, and felt like I floated to the

toilet and peed for a long time, wandering back to where the doctor lifted

me up like the feather I had become.

—

The last few years, throughout the late nineties, I had been chasing a love I

didn’t have. A love that I thought did, but didn’t, belong to me. I chased

literally—leaving Hollywood and moving to Northern California—

figuratively, and spiritually: 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, better at love and loving. I was watching my own life, and

suddenly it ran out right in front of me.

Suddenly, one fine, pretty afternoon, all of my questions were more than

answered. Without gauze or haze or pretense: all of those efforts failed. The

facts were just that: I was not loved, not wanted; I was less than.

In my fine and decent desire to be something more than I had been

before, something I thought might be more real, I had failed. I had done

everything I could think of, and nothing was the correct thing, nothing the

right action. I thought at that time that if I kept doing what I thought was the

correct and spiritually elegant thing to do, the thing I longed for would open

to me. It did not. I had simply made bad choices. Uninformed choices.

Spiritually impoverished choices. I had let the core me go in order to be

“more.” I thought I wasn’t enough. I couldn’t wife it away.

I was ignorant of the fact that I was not in the correct place for me or

that I could leave, because, per usual, I wanted to be good at this. I wanted

to do what I said. Even if I had made a mistake, I would carry it through, I

would figure it out.

Until this time and this moment, when I had reached too far, wanted too

much, I accepted what I shouldn’t have, made deals with myself in an effort

to figure out why I had given up so much for so little. 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. It made it so much easier to give it

away. After all, what was I? An actress? A fundraiser? Did I matter? Was

the assessment of me true? 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 fifty years of marriage, as if they were alone. I was not aware

that there were people who just didn’t love their spouses. I believed that

even divorced people struggled with those big decisions. I was swimming

in quicksand, losing all points of reference. I can tell you this: when I failed

at the thing I left everything behind for—the thing I saw growing up, the

real kind of love that matters—I had nothing left within to find me.

Weighed down by this new knowledge, this failure, I’d walked down the

hall 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 saplings (ones that would bloom

with no scent), which seemed to be doing so well. 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 back of the sofa,

smashing into the coffee table, telephone, tablets, pens, papers, remotes,

pillows, the sofas themselves going this way and that as my head bounced

off the floor, bearing the brunt of my fall.

Haunted by memories, I lay there for what seemed a long time, time

itself floating by while I was fascinated with the fibers in the rug, the lack

of color in the room, and ultimately grateful for my aloneness. I think I

slept there, or blacked out there.

Thankfully, there was a group of three young, local San Francisco–based

Irish nannies who rotated coming in to help with my son, Roan, who I had

only recently adopted, and who was very young at the time, 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 forty, and sure I didn’t know much of anything at all about

parenting.

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,

the numbness creeping up my leg, as I looked up at the trees, heard words

from the radio, thought, Oh, I must have anthrax poisoning, and felt tears

running down my face, as this was just two weeks after 9/11. Fortunately

someone pulled up beside me and offered to help me, guiding me home and

taking me into my house. Where 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 took a down

comforter into the yard and tried to feel the sun. I couldn’t get warm. I went

upstairs and lay on my heated bathroom floor. The phone rang; someone

stepped over me. I was holding a space outside and above my head where I

thought the pain was, talking to myself while crying and moaning.

Thankfully, the speakerphone was on; it was Mimi. I tried to holler but

croaked out instead, “Mimi, help me.”

She insisted an ambulance be called.

Instead there was a call to my gynecologist; I guess that’s what some

people always think is wrong with women: “Must be her lady parts.”

My gynecologist heard me moaning and said to take my blood pressure,

while she stayed on the line. We had one of those cuffs, and a defibrillator,

as everyone in my house, including my staff and children, gets CPR and

rescue training regularly, and stays up to date. My blood pressure was over

the moon, both figures high in the hundreds. My doctor said we had a few

minutes to get me to the hospital, which was just down the street, making

clear that she would be standing outside waiting. She had been my

attending doctor for my miscarriages and knew the fragility of my situation.

I was stuffed into our truck, my legs not really following my thoughts

any longer. I slumped against the passenger door in the front seat. When we

got to the California Pacific Medical Center, the burly attendant opened the

door and I fell out upside down and backward into his warm and strong

arms and passed out. I had made it. I let go. Somehow I had hung on until I

fell into safety’s arms.

They hustled me inside and onto a gurney, and immediately put me into

a CAT scan machine, the noise so loud it was as if someone were

hammering my mind from the inside out.

—

After I first woke up, Dr. Handsome told me the transfer ambulance had

arrived. “They have everything you need at the other hospital,” he said, and

gave me an encouraging smile. Two young men picked me up and moved

me onto another portable gurney and I passed out yet again. As they were

putting me into the ambulance, that gurney’s wheel hit the bottom of the

truck and stirred me. I opened my eyes into the bright sunlight and saw a

paramedic with white light surrounding him and wasn’t sure if I was still

alive as I passed out again.

I woke up in Moffitt-Long’s neurological ICU. There were no rooms,

just a nurses’ central unit with beds in a circle around it, each one on a scale

to measure our body weight and mass, curtains in between and in front of

us. Lots of machines and hoses—it looked like a Fritz Lang movie. 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. I took it in.

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 theater.”

“For what?” I began to panic some more; this panic thing was starting to

become more and more my full-time state of being.

“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; I needed a minute to absorb all of this.

But he told me that we didn’t have time or we would lose the room. I could

not get him to stop or call the doctor to help me in any way. So I did what I

could: I gathered myself and stood up on that moving gurney. Which took

every last bit of might, of strength, I had left.

Nurses and other hospital personnel came running. “She doesn’t want to

go to the surgery room,” the orderly announced. A nurse came and asked

me why, and I told her that I had been signed up for exploratory brain

surgery without my knowledge or consent and with no discussion of what

that could or would mean. The nurse said she would get the doctor.

He came running, white coat flapping, and told me to lie down and do

what I was told. A fine hello, I have to say. He told us all that someone had

signed all of the papers and we were well under way. 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. I

realized that, brain bleed or not, this was a mess that I had to handle—now.

Still standing, ass out of my gown on the gurney, not giving up any

ground, 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, blond fifty-

something woman who I later realized was not dissimilar to someone I

would get to be simply because she had the courage to be brave and true 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, as they had been led to believe that I was “sleeping

and shouldn’t be disturbed,” not that I had been signed up for exploratory

brain surgery without anyone being consulted.

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 fistfight; 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 friend Donna Chavous was there. Chavous and I had been through

all kinds of hellcat endeavors in the past, including the day I became

famous. We were at a movie and came out afterward and the whole theater

of people was just hanging out in front and didn’t leave. We slowly came to

realize they were looking at us. Chavous whispered, “Run,” to me and we

did; we ran like thieves in the night, and yes, they all ran after us. We ran

and ran across streets of moving cars, into a restaurant, into its kitchen, and

slid under its chef’s cutting table. The owner, having locked the front door

behind us, leaned down and asked us what he could do for us. Chavous got

tequila, I got a martini. The owner, knowing better than we did what was

happening, asked us where our car was and got a waiter to go and get it and

helped us to get out amid the frenzy and get home. Chavous and I had been

martial arts partners, always racing each other in our cars while talking on

our speakerphones, getting to the dojo late and doing push-ups on our

knuckles to be allowed entrance. Yes, always pushing it, and having a ball.

We always took care of each other.

Now she stayed for the entire time, days and nights, sleeping in a

window seat at the hospital. Just to be sure.

My mother was determined no one was going to...well, as she would

say, “fuck with my kid.” She had had it. This was “too goddamn far.” She

was scared. Scared to stillness, scared beyond her rage, beyond her humor,

beyond all telling. 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, still waving his fax, his

fifteen minutes. He felt we didn’t have the time and believed I really didn’t

need to know. I felt I really did. I felt I deserved knowledge about what this

potential brain surgery would mean for me. 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? Where do you put it?

We are in earthquake country; does it go on a tray or in a sterile box? Then

what? How large of a section of my head will you remove? Will you cut

through the nerves?” I have always been a thorough asker of questions. I

made my inquiries in a slow, thoughtful panic that seemed quite logical to

me. He was impatient, irritated, and seemed to think my questions were

trivial and a waste of his time. I thought it was reasonable to spend ten

minutes finding out where my brain would be during and after this surgery.

He thought I was a nag. I realized I had fired the right guy.

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. What could

happen? How much more would I bleed into my brain waiting these

twenty-four hours? How much damage could that cause? Could I die or just

lose some senses? If so, which? Would it be reparable? There is so little

known about these issues that at the best of times the answers are vague,

even when your brain isn’t bleeding, even when you aren’t terrified. 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 into my femoral artery at the top of the leg and the

front of the pelvis. That camera would go all the way through my body and

up into my head and look around.

That felt so much better than half of my head on a tray. So that’s what

we did. But they did not find the cause of the bleeding.

—

Not too long before this fiasco I had endured another one. I had had a breast

exam, only to have that doctor call me and say he needed to come out to the

house to talk to me.

This is never great news. I spent that day preparing myself for a drive

into a brick wall. Of course he said there was a tumor, a large one, one he

thought would be malignant, one he thought must come out, one they would

look at while I was out to determine how much more they might need to

take. I responded with the calm I had prepared all day to have: “Hey, if it’s

cancer, take both breasts.” I should have won an Oscar for that one.

My doctor said, “If I had more patients like you, I would have more

women alive today.”

Fortunately, that tumor, though gigantic, bigger than my breast alone,

was benign. Unfortunately, I had tumors in both breasts and had to have

some serious surgery and some reconstruction.

I was still recovering from that, and it hurt less to lie on my side. No

one, especially me, thought to mention this before the current procedure,

nor did I receive a complete physical exam. It turned out that lying in that

position had caused blood to pool on one side of my head, which made it

confusing for the doctors to see where the origin of this bleed was.

Consensus was that it might have been a small aneurysm that had bled ....................................