Brooke Shields feared being paralyzed after breaking her femur in January – and then faced the threat of dying from a staph infection during her recovery, according to a new interview.
The “Suddenly Susan” star said “survival mode came into action” as soon as she fell off a balance board at a gym in New York and suffered a serious injury during training.
“Sounds came up that I had never heard before,” she reminded People. “I always said, ‘I can feel my toes’ because I was so afraid of being paralyzed.”
Shields immediately underwent surgery to insert two metal shafts, “one from the top of my hip down and the other through the hip joint”.
However, the broken part of his femur soon burst, forcing the Golden Globe nominated star to undergo a second surgery to “add five rods and a metal plate to anchor everything in place”.
“I never considered myself Zen, but I realized with a certain calm that the rest depends on me now,” she said.
The Battle of Shields did not end there. Two weeks after her second surgery, she developed a staph infection that they feared to be MRSA at site IV, where she received three blood transfusions.
“Thank God it wasn’t,” said Shields, 55. “If it was, my doctor said it would be a race against time. This is how you can get septic. It seemed unthinkable. “
Shields is relearning how to walk and documenting his physiotherapy sessions on Instagram. She started with sessions once a day, but she challenged herself to increase it to twice a day.
“For the first time in my entire life, I thought, ‘I can’t take this,’” she recalled. “I can’t even stand or climb a step. I need to relearn even to walk. The feeling of helplessness is shocking. “
But she pushed, saying, “If anything, I’m a fighter.”