‘I THOUGHT I WOULDN'T WALK AGAIN’
What started as a typical session at her gym in downtown New York quickly turned into a life-threatening ordeal for Brooke Shields. Opening up for the first time about her horrific accident in January, the 55-year-old explained how she’d fallen off a balance board and landed so hard, she snapped her right femur.
“It felt like it was all in slow motion. And then I just started screaming,” Brooke recalls, admitting she even feared she may be paralysed and unable to walk again.
But the worst was yet to come. She underwent surgery to insert two metal rods in her hip, but complications led to a second surgery to add five more rods and a metal plate to keep her leg intact.
The actress spent twoand-a-half weeks in hospital, where her husband Chris Henchy and daughters Rowan, 17, and Grier, 14, couldn't even visit due to COVID-19 restrictions.
And upon returning home, the nightmare continued when she developed a staph infection, forcing her to have three blood transfusions.
“At first they feared it might be MRSA [a bacteria resistant to antibiotics],” she said. “If it had been, my doctor said it would have been a race against time.”
Brooke’s journey to recovery has been a challenging one. She has had to do physical therapy once a day and come to terms with the fact she can’t push herself to heal,” she admits. “For the first time in my entire life, I thought, ‘I can’t power through this. I can’t even stand on my leg or go up a step. I need to relearn how to walk.’ The feeling of helplessness is shocking.”
But the star is determined to get better, insisting, “If anything, I’m a fighter.”