On Tuesday, Ashley Judd shared much more details – along with a photo gallery – of her distressing experience after suffering a broken leg in the Congolese jungle last week. Specifically, she spoke of the locals who helped her through the ordeal. Without them, she wrote, “My internal bleeding probably would have killed me.”
She revealed that, lying in agony on the forest floor, a man named Dieumerci “stretched out his leg and placed it under my left leg, totally misshapen to try to keep it still. It was broken in four places and had nerve damage. Dieumerci (“Thanks to God”) remained seated, without moving or wavering, for 5 hours on the rainforest floor. “
The actress then recalled a scene that looked like it was out of a survival movie. After looking for her for 5 hours, another local man named Papa Jean gave her a stick to bite, then began to readjust the broken pieces of her leg.
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“It took 5 hours, but finally he found me, miserable and wild on the ground, and calmly assessed my broken leg. He told me what to do. I bit a stick. I held Maud. And Papa Jean, for sure, started manipulating and adjusting my broken bones back to something like a position where I could be transported, while screaming and squirming. How he did it so methodically while I was like an animal is beyond me. He saved me. “
A group of men improvised a hammock and spent three hours cautiously carrying Judd through the forest to the nearest means of transport.
Then, a heroic friend – aptly named Maradona – offered to ride the bankrupt actress for six hours on a motorcycle, preventing her from falling and holding her broken foot in place.
“Didier drove the motorcycle. I sat on my back, your back against my back. When I started to pass out, to pass out, he would call me to reestablish my position and lean on him. Maradona rode on the back of the motorcycle, I faced him. He held my broken leg under the heel and I held the broken top together with both hands. Together, we did this for 6 hours on an uneven, bumpy and bumpy dirt road that has ravines for the rain that drips during the rainy season. Maradona was the only person to volunteer for this task ”.
The actress previously recalled that she lost and lost consciousness when going into shock, repeatedly reciting “the Lord is my shepherd, I will not lack anything” from Psalm 23.
“The difference between a Congolese person and me is the disaster insurance that allowed me 55 hours after my accident reached an operating table in South Africa,” she says, adding that villages in Congo have not only electricity, but “ a simple pill to kill the pain when you break a leg in four places and have nerve damage. “
Judd wrote that he decided to talk about the accident to spread the word about “what it means to be Congolese in extreme poverty, without access to health care, any pain medication, any type of service or options.”
The actress now says, from her hospital bed in South Africa: “I wake up crying with gratitude, deeply moved by each person who contributed something to give life and save the spirit during my exhausting odyssey of 55 hours”