Sharon Stone Says She Needs '8 Hours of Uninterrupted Sleep' 'So That I Don't Have Seizures' (Exclusive)

Sharon Stone says she's "become more comfortable with publicly saying what's really happened to me," over 20 years after she nearly died due to a health incident.

In 2001, the actress was given a 1 percent chance of living after a ruptured vertebral artery bled into her brain for nine days. At the time Stone, 65, was thriving both professionally and personally. She had received her first Oscar nomination for Casino five years prior. And months before, she had adopted her son Roan, now 23, with her then-husband, newspaper editor Phil Bronstein. (She has since adopted two more children: sons Laird, 18, and Quinn, 17.)

"For a long time I wanted to pretend that I was just fine," Stone says. "I need eight hours of uninterrupted sleep for my brain medication to work so that I don’t have seizures. So I’m a disability hire, and because of that I don’t get hired a lot. These are the things that I’ve been dealing with for the past 22 years, and I am open about that now."

Following the incident, Stone went through a dark period: her marriage fell apart (she and Bronstein divorced in 2004), and, she says, Hollywood stopped calling. 

Recalling her initial recovery process, Stone says she was "stuttering" in the early stages and not "seeing correctly." She says she also suffered from memory loss for a long period.

 "I lost everything," she says. "I lost all my money. I lost custody of my child. I lost my career. I lost all those things that you feel are your real identity and your life."

"I never really got most of it back," she adds, "but I’ve reached a point where I’m okay with it, where I really do recognize that I’m enough."

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Asked how she gained the courage to share her story, Stone explains, "I come from a very broken family. I grew up believing that taking care of everybody else was what I was supposed to do. It took me a long time to understand that I had a life of my own and that I didn’t have to fix it for everybody else, and that it was okay for me to receive care, for me to be enough as a disabled person. I feel proud of myself and proud of my accomplishments — from surviving to helping others survive."

Today, Stone's on the board of the Barrow Neurological Foundation, which supports the medical institute Stone’s brain surgeon Dr. Michael Lawton leads in Arizona, and is hosting its annual Neuro Night fundraiser on Oct. 27. Per its website, the Foundation's mission is "saving human lives through innovative treatment, groundbreaking, curative research and educating the next generation of the world’s leading neuro clinicians."

"She’s an inspiration to those who suffer from anything neurological,” says Lawton, whom Stone credits for saving her life.

For more about Stone, pick up this week's issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.