Ashley Judd is recovering from a “catastrophic” fall – which nearly cost her a leg – as she suffered conservation work in a rainforest in Congo.
Judd, 52, described “an incredibly painful 55-hour period” in a live Instagram discussion with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on his bed at the ICU in South Africa. . Judd explained that he tripped over a fallen tree while working to track down the bonobos, an endangered species of large monkeys, breaking his leg in four places and leaving him with nerve injuries.
Judd’s ordeal – which he said left him “right on my side” also included manual and motorcycle transport in points, during which time he bit on a stick, “screaming like a wild animal”, in time what he lost and the conscious recovery and repetition of a biblical passage. (Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd, I will not desire him”, for the curious.)
However, the actress stressed the privilege of having access to medical care, saying that a Congolese person in the same position would not have even been removed from the village and would have lost his leg and potential life.
“The difference between a Congolese person and me is disaster insurance, which allowed me 55 hours after my accident to reach an operating table in South Africa,” she said, noting that many Congolese villages do not only have electricity, but also medical equipment such as painkillers, a point he reiterated in a separate post on Instagram.
“The bonobos matter,” she said. “So are the people in whose ancestral forest lie the other 25,600,000 Congolese in need of humanitarian assistance.”