Kate Walsh reveals she had a brain tumor removed

— -- Kate Walsh has played a doctor on TV, but two years ago she found herself dealing with a real-life health crisis.

The former "Grey’s Anatomy" and "Private Practice" actress revealed to Cosmopolitan that she had a benign brain tumor removed in 2015.

She said symptoms of fatigue and losing her train of thought prompted her to go to the doctor.

“The words ‘brain tumor’ were never in my zeitgeist,” Walsh told the magazine. “I went in for the MRI, and you know it’s serious when they don’t even wait, they’re like ‘Hey, the radiologist wants to see you.’ And she starts to say, ‘Well, it looks like you have a very sizable brain tumor,’ and I just left my body ... It was never anything I would have imagined.”

Walsh added that her role as a medical professional on TV didn’t make things any easier for her.

“It was the total opposite! You’d think that after playing Dr. Addison for the better part of a decade, where I spent more time on a hospital set than at my house, that I would feel somehow more comfortable, but I was such a little scaredy-cat,” she said.

Ultimately, she had a successful surgery, and Walsh took nine months off to recover -- which wasn't easy for her. “I love to work hard and do 800 things at once, and this was a really amazing lesson in just submitting to the process of healing,” she said.

Now, Walsh, who has partnered with Cigna healthcare as part of its TV Doctors campaign, is encouraging others to make sure that they make regular trips to the doctor.

"We should go get a checkup the same way we go to the gym," she said, "instead of waiting for something to go wrong.”