Sharon Stone returns home after brain surgery

HEALTH SCARE After eight days of hospitalization for bleeding in her brain, Sharon Stone was sent home on Sunday, with doctors expecting the 43-year-old actress to make a full recovery. Two angiograms showed no major aneurysms, and doctors performed a coil embolization, using a mass of coils to block blood flow through a damaged artery. Dr. Michael Lawton, chief of cerebrovascular surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, said yesterday, ”Sharon Stone is completely intact neurologically and she will have no medical restrictions on her personal or professional activities.”

SOUND BITES In addition to headlining next weekend’s benefit concert for terror relief at Madison Square Garden, Paul McCartney will donate all proceeds from his new single, ”From a Lover to a Friend,” to the families of firefighters who died at the World Trade Center. ”I have great admiration for the courage those guys showed,” said McCartney, whose father was a volunteer fireman, in a statement. ”I hope that the sales of this new single will help raise money for the firemen and the families.”…

Garth Brooks seems to have been in virtual seclusion since his last album four years ago; he’s retired from touring, he and his wife are divorcing, and he’s living in a rural area of Oklahoma. But yesterday, he launched a multimedia campaign to promote his upcoming album, ”Scarecrow,” due out November 13. The campaign was supposed to begin with the release of the single ”Beer Run,” a duet with George Jones, in September, but that plan was scrapped in the wake of the terror attacks. Brooks kicked off yesterday’s event, at Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, with a patriotic flourish, with a U.S. Marine Corps color guard, the playing of a recording of the national anthem, and a choir of Nashville first-graders singing ”God Bless America” and waving flags. Brooks finally appeared, playing his new single ”Wrapped Up in You,” before cheering fans who had come from all over the country and camped out all night to see him. Next, Brooks is doing an online promotion and televised special with AOL Time Warner (also EW.com’s parent company) and a commercial for Dr. Pepper, his first endorsement deal ever. ”For the first time in my life, I think I made a happy album,” he said….