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When Grey’s Anatomy star Kate Walsh sat down in front of a very reputable neurologist at the renowned Cedars Sinai hospital in LA — you know the place where the likes of Victoria Beckham and Kim Kardashian had their babies and where icons like Lucille Ball and Frank Sinatra took their last breaths — she thought he would understand the fear that had brought her to his office.

She had avoided going to the Emergency Room as it would have been too public, instead waiting for the referral in the hopes they would give her an MRI to investigate the worrying set of symptoms she had been experiencing.

Watch: Kate Walsh on the 30 Seconds That Changed Her’ Career (& Life). Post continues below.

She’d been feeling increasingly tired and run down. But while that was easily explained away as overworking or the fact that she was experiencing early menopause that started when she was just 39, she started experiencing some more concerning issues.

Her yoga coach pointed out that her right side was dipping, and eventually that would lead to a scary experience while behind the wheel of her car.

“I was veering to the right side, but all the things were like ‘oh I have attention deficit disorder, I’m reading Murakami it’s very dense, that’s why, I’m on the phone too much whatever’, but then I was like I need to have an MRI,” Kate told Mamamia’s Well podcast during a sit-down interview in Sydney.

She knew something wasn’t right, but instead of her doctor listening to her concerns and ordering the test that would either find the issue or relieve the fears of what it could be, she was delivered a line that so many of us have heard in one form or another, that maybe, it was just all in her head.

“He said, ‘oh you’re an actress in your 40s, you’re out of work and you’re going through menopause, you need some anti depressants’.”

Yes, the woman who played Dr Addison Montgomery in Grey’s Anatomy for the better part of 10 years and its spin off Private Practice for 6 seasons, an actress who is acclaimed for her talent and is known the world over, was getting the very same treatment from her doctor that all of us can identify with.

But while many of us would have taken the word of a doctor — whose accreditation would surely mean he knows what he’s doing, as gospel — Kate had other ideas.

“I was like, respectfully, I have a shrink who can prescribe and I just want to get an MRI.”

“What do you think’s wrong with you?” he shot back.

The actress — who now lives in WA — explained to WELL that while she had played a doctor on TV for almost 10 years, she wasn’t one to go to the doctor regularly, beyond the usual OB stuff, but she knew that in this moment, she had to stand up for herself.

Listen to Kate Walsh on the WELL podcast here. Post continues below.

“I had to really push. He’s like, ‘What do you think you’re going to find?’ and I go ‘I don’t know, I just want to have a look’.”

“It was as if I was asking him to build the MRI machine,” she said, “and I think it was an insurance thing, who knows but I pushed… and yeah, they found a pretty sizeable tumour.”

Walsh was diagnosed with a meningioma.

“In the end they found out it was in my left hemisphere and so it was the swelling. At the end, it was massive and so it was impinging on my right side and all the motor skills there,” she said.

Luckily for Kate, the tumour was benign and she had it removed just three days after the MRI results.

She says she didn’t spend those three days going over what was about to happen, until the surgery day arrived and it all came into focus.

“It didn’t really occur to me, even to that day… I was like ‘oh wait hold on hold on time out you gotta take my skull off?'”

The actress says the months after the surgery were pretty rough, explaining it was like her brain was trying to reboot her body. While she didn’t have to learn to walk again, the messages to her extremities weren’t quite connecting correctly.

She also had to get her stamina and strength back, saying despite her being badly impacted for only a short time, her muscles had weakened and she experienced times when her eyes would close of their own accord like the “awnings” were coming down.

“As soon as I came out of anaesthesia I was like I’m myself again so that was great and then the recovery was gnarly,” she said.

Kate and her team managed to keep her private medical issues out of the tabloids, she says they had to keep in mind how her diagnosis might impact any future work.

“There was a stigma if…they find out you’re sick or you’ve had a health challenge, then you might not get work. So I waited and was able to keep it really quiet,” she said

“But I travelled and I took almost a year off before I went back to work. I wanted to go back to work and show people that…all my memory was fine and I could handle it.”

Her advice to anyone going through a major medical moment like she did, is to find someone who has gone through it and support each other.

“I found what I call my brain buddy, which I’ve done in lots of different circumstances in life, medically and otherwise when I get scared… I find someone who’s gone through it who’s ahead of me” she said.

“I talked to them so that I know what to expect because the surgeons are surgeons and they are the best in the world, but they have more surgeries to do… and in women’s health… there’s not a lot of outpatient support so that was very helpful to hear that ‘Hey, in about 3 months your skull will sink'”

She said “if I was just showering and all of a sudden I felt this divot in my skull that would’ve fully freaked me out, you know?”

She also said she would always bring a friend to a doctor’s appointment because she knows that she tends to disassociate when they’re telling her details and it helps to have someone also there taking notes alongside you.

While Kate has been through a lot, she still feels very blessed to have come out the other side knowing that it could have been a very different outcome.

“I was so lucky this was in my front left lobe right under the dura which is the little protective skin that covers the brain if you will. It was right there on top and they could get the whole thing so I was very, very lucky, and so relieved,” she said.

“There were complications from the steroids. I got avascular necrosis in my hips which then I had to have hip replacements. It was like, ‘hey, the gift that keeps on giving’ but I had a really good run until 48.

Listen to Kate Walsh in conversation with Well co-host Claire Murphy on Well, wherever you get your podcasts.

Feature Image: Supplied.

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