5 stroke signs every woman should know after Dr. Pimple Popper star suffers stroke while filming

Dr. Sandra Lee — the dermatologist millions know from her hit television series Dr. Pimple Popper — was in the middle of a normal working day in November 2025 when her body began sending signals she almost missed entirely.

She was filming at her dermatology practice in Upland, California, seeing patients the way she had done thousands of times before, when she felt something shift. A wave of heat. Sudden sweating. A strange sense of not quite feeling like herself. She was in her fifties and going through menopause, and the sensation felt familiar enough — a hot flash, she told herself, the kind that millions of women experience and push through every day without a second thought. So she kept working. She finished filming. She drove to her parents’ home afterward, and that was when things began to change in ways she could no longer explain away. Shooting pains moved through one of her legs. Walking down the stairs became difficult in a way that didn’t make sense. By the following morning, the picture was impossible to ignore. When she held out her hand, it slowly collapsed. Her speech became labored. Enunciating words she had said effortlessly her entire life suddenly required effort she couldn’t fully produce. I thought, am I having a stroke, she told People magazine in a recent interview. Her father, also a physician, urged her immediately to go to the emergency room. An MRI confirmed what she had suspected and hoped wasn’t true — an ischemic stroke, the kind that occurs when blood flow to the brain is obstructed and brain cells are deprived of the oxygen and nutrients they need to survive. What essentially happened, she said, is that a part of my brain died. She is sharing her story now because of what almost stopped her from getting help in time — the fact that her first symptom felt completely ordinary, completely dismissible, completely like something millions of women experience on an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon and think nothing of.

The reason Dr. Lee’s story matters beyond her own recovery is what it reveals about the way strokes present differently in women — and how dangerously easy those differences make it to wait too long.

The American Heart Association identifies stroke as one of the leading causes of death and long-term disability in the United States, and the numbers specific to women are striking. Women account for approximately sixty percent of all stroke-related deaths — a figure that reflects not just biology but the reality that women’s symptoms are frequently atypical, frequently mild in their early presentation, and frequently mistaken for something far less urgent. The classic warning signs most people have heard of follow the FAST acronym — Face drooping, Arm weakness, Speech difficulty, Time to call emergency services — and these remain important and valid indicators that something is seriously wrong. But physicians are increasingly recognizing that women often experience an entirely different set of signals that don’t appear in the standard list and don’t trigger the same alarm bells, either in the person experiencing them or in the people around them. Dr. Pooja Khatri, a professor of neurology at the University of Cincinnati, has explained this clearly — women more frequently have atypical and vague symptoms, she says, things like fatigue, confusion, or general weakness, as opposed to the sudden one-sided paralysis that most people picture when they think of a stroke. These vaguer symptoms are dangerous precisely because they don’t look like what people expect a stroke to look like. They look like exhaustion. They look like stress. They look like menopause, which is exactly what Dr. Lee thought she was experiencing when her brain was already in crisis. In stroke care, the phrase used is time is brain — meaning that every minute of delayed treatment corresponds to brain cells that cannot be recovered. A symptom that is brushed off as fatigue and slept on overnight is a symptom that cost the brain hours it could not afford to lose.

There are five warning signs that medical professionals specifically want women to recognize and take seriously, particularly because they are the ones most likely to be dismissed.

The first is sudden and overwhelming fatigue — not the tiredness that comes from a poor night’s sleep or a demanding week, but a wave of exhaustion that arrives without an obvious cause and feels different from anything familiar. The second is weakness, which may present as the classic numbness or heaviness on one side of the body but can also feel like a complete and inexplicable physical drain that arrives suddenly and doesn’t lift. The third is confusion or difficulty with speech — suddenly struggling to form simple thoughts, losing the thread of a conversation, finding words that should come easily slipping away or coming out wrong. The fourth is unusual pain or numbness, particularly sensations that are one-sided or that appear without explanation, and severe pain anywhere in the body during what should be a normal moment should always prompt immediate attention rather than a decision to wait and see. The fifth is dizziness or loss of balance — feeling lightheaded or unsteady in a way that is sudden and out of place, or losing coordination when walking in a way that cannot be attributed to anything obvious. Any one of these symptoms arriving suddenly and without a clear cause is worth treating as an emergency rather than a reason to lie down and see whether it passes. What Dr. Lee now understands, looking back at the day she thought she was having a hot flash, is that the body was already telling her the truth — she just had every reason a woman in her position would have to interpret that truth as something smaller and more manageable than it was.

Dr. Lee has been open about the fact that her recovery is ongoing and that the stroke changed her in ways that are still present in her daily life more than a year later.

She is conscious now of how she speaks in a way she never was before. She notices, she says, that she doesn’t speak exactly the way she used to, and that awareness brings its own kind of emotional weight — the embarrassment of hearing yourself reach for fluency that used to be effortless and finding the distance between where you are and where you were. She stepped away from filming to focus on physical therapy and rebuilding her strength and coordination, and the process has been slower and more humbling than she expected. Looking back at the contributing factors, she identifies elevated blood pressure, uncontrolled cholesterol, and chronic high stress as the conditions that set the stage for what happened — risk factors that were present and known but not managed with the urgency they deserved. She frames the experience now as a blessing in disguise, not because it wasn’t frightening and costly and painful, but because it forced a reckoning with how she was treating her own health while devoting her professional life to caring for others. Her message is direct and it is worth repeating clearly — if something feels wrong and you cannot fully explain why, do not wait. Do not talk yourself out of seeking help. Do not assume that because the symptom seems manageable or explainable that it is safe to ignore. The body speaks in the language it has available to it, and sometimes that language sounds like a hot flash or a tired leg or a morning where the words just won’t come out right. Trust what you feel. Get checked. The few minutes it takes to make that call could be the most important decision you make — not just for yourself, but for everyone who needs you here.

Every woman has brushed off a symptom at least once. Every woman knows someone who waited too long. Share this before it becomes someone’s story you wish you had shared sooner. ❤️