“Accidents happen – and there was a fallen tree on the path that I didn’t see and I took a very powerful step and just fell off that tree,” she told New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on Friday. “Since I was breaking my leg, I knew it was breaking.”
It took “55 incredibly distressing hours” to take her from the jungle to an operating table in South Africa.
She was stuck on the floor for five hours with a “malformed leg”, biting a stick because of the pain and “howling like a wild animal”.
She ended up being taken to a trauma unit on a motorcycle, holding the top of her broken tibia.
“We did this for six hours,” she recalled. “I was at the limit of my limit.”
The star and activist of “Double Jeopardy” spends much of the year in Africa and wanted to use the interview to raise awareness about issues of poverty and animal protection. She was there on a research project on bonobos, a species of primates threatened with extinction.
Judd recognized the “privilege” that allowed him to receive relatively quick medical care. “Most of the people I know would not have had access.”