As household chores go, ironing doesn’t seem like the riskiest one out there, though the potential for burns merits a little extra care when the appliance is turned on. But as Sharon Stone recently discovered, even a cold iron can pack an unexpected punch.
During a visit to the “Films To Be Buried With” podcast, the actress casually reflected on the time she planned to press some clothes but found herself flung across the room instead.
The iron, as it turns out, wasn’t the cause of the calamity. She was simply adding water to the iron’s reservoir when disaster — in the form of a lightning bolt — struck.
“Wow! It's really intense,” the 62-year-old told host Brett Goldstein of the experience. “I was at home. We had our own well. I was filling the iron with water, and I had one hand on the faucet, one hand on the iron and the well got hit with lightning and the lighting came up through the water.”
The extraordinary set of circumstances knocked her right off her feet.
“I got picked up and thrown across the kitchen, and I hit the refrigerator,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Woah!’”
And since the strike left her out of it momentarily, there was another blow to come.
“My mother was standing there, and my mother just belted me across the face and brought me to,” the “Basic Instinct” star continued. “I was in such an altered state, like just so, I don't know how to describe it — so bright, like wow — and she threw me in the car and drove me to hospital and the EKG (electrocardiogram) was showing such electricity in my body. I had to go get EKGs every single day for 10 days.”
The odds of an individual being hit by lightning in any given year are only about one in 1,000,000, and closer to one in 10,000 over the course of that person’s lifetime, but Stone explained that she’s used to the odds being against her.
“I’ve had a lot of things,” she noted. “It’s crazy.”
Among those things is the stroke she suffered in 2001, which resulted in nine days of brain hemorrhaging. Then there was another incident from even earlier.
“I got caught in a clothesline and had my neck cut to a sixteenth of an inch from my jugular vein,” she said of an injury she survived as a teen.
That series of harrowing confessions led Goldstein to declare the star “a miracle.”
But Stone’s not the only miracle in Tinseltown. Fellow actress Cate Blanchett recently confessed her own frightening close call.
“I had a bit of a chainsaw accident yesterday, which sounds very, very exciting, but it wasn't,” the 51-year-old revealed on “A Podcast of One’s Own” with former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. “Apart from the little nick to my head, we’re fine.”