SEIZURE SCARE FOR BROOKE
Cooper ‘Shields’ her
Brooke Shields revealed she recently suffered a grand mal seizure that resulted in her being rushed to the hospital via ambulance.
The “Pretty Baby” star had been preparing for her one-woman show at The Carlyle when she collapsed on Sept. 7 and started “frothing at the mouth.”
“I was drinking so much water, and I didn’t know I was low in sodium. I was waiting for an Uber,” she recalled in Glamour’s Women of the Year 2023 issue, published Wednesday.
“I get down to the bottom of the steps, and I start evidently looking weird, and [the people I was with] were like, ‘Are you OK?’ ”
Shields, 58, made her way to West Village hotspot L’Artusi, but suddenly her surroundings went dark.
“I go in, two women come up to me; I don’t know them. Everything starts to go black. Then my hands drop to my side and I go headfirst into the wall,” she said. “The next thing I remember, I’m being loaded into an ambulance. I have oxygen on. And Bradley f--king Cooper is sitting next to me holding my hand.”
The sommelier at L’Artusi had tried to call Shields’ husband, Chris Henchy, but reached an assistant who got another assistant to contact the “Maestro” star, 48, because he was nearby.
“And then it was like, I walked in with Jesus,” Shields quipped, adding that physicians first thought her “brain was seizing.”
Cooper, who has been friends with the actress since starring together in the horror film “The Midnight Meat Train” in 2008, told Shields he was going to the hospital with her.
A doctor told the “A Castle for Christmas” star that her seizure, which landed her in the intensivecare unit, was due to low sodium after drinking too much water for an extended period of time.
“I flooded my system, and I drowned myself,” she said, “and if you don’t have enough sodium in your blood or urine or your body, you can have a seizure.”
Doctors first wrongly suspected she was cutting back on salt for vanity reasons, to reduce bloating.
But she began chugging water, she said, because she “felt dehydrated” and was “singing more than I’ve ever sung in my life and doing a show and a podcast.”
Shields made a full recovery and continued her series of shows at the famed hotel.