“Castle” star Tamala Jones has opened up about suffering a brain aneurysm when she was 23 years old and her decision to keep it secret over fears it would hurt her career by making her “look weak.”

The now thirty-seven-year-old actress, who plays Dr. Lanie Parish on the popular ABC drama Castle, shared her terrifying experience in an interview with Black Enterprise.

“[I woke] up one morning with a massive headache; feeling like I had to use the bathroom, like I had to urinate really bad.  I was walking on my toes and I was stomping. When I got to the bathroom, I plopped down on the toilet. I had no control over my body weight. And when I couldn’t go I was like, Oh, my God, I just had to pee really bad and now I don’t have to. Then, I got up because my head was hurting, and I looked in the mirror and I’m telling you two seconds after I looked in that mirror I dropped and hit the floor.”

She recalls struggling through work that day, filming the sitcom “For Your Love.”

” I went to the hospital after work and the doctor thought that it was a miracle that I was even alive, walking or talking, or that I even worked an entire day before I got to him. After that, I started having seizures. I had MRIs (and) cat scans, and they found out that my aneurysm actually burst. Had it been on another side of my brain I probably would have been paralysed forever – it was on the left side of my brain… They said once that blood dried up I would get my feeling back.”

It took Jones three months to recover and once she was back on her feet she kept her health scare a secret.

“I hid the fact that I had an aneurysm for a very long time. I was embarrassed and I just felt like no one needed to know because it made me look weak… But I felt like it was my duty as a survivor to speak about it.”

She hopes that by sharing her experience, she’ll be able to urge others urge to seek medical attention as soon as they feel any unusual pains.

“I mention the aneurysm to anybody that I can… because it’s something that happened to me and something that can happen to anybody in this world. If you are given warning then you can probably save your own life.”

Read the full interview here at BlackEnterprise.com.