Brooke Shields feared she could be paralyzed after breaking her femur in January – and then faced the threat of dying of a staph infection during recovery, according to a new interview.
“Suddenly Susan” star said that “the way of survival began” as soon as she fell off a balance sheet at a gym in New York and suffered a serious injury during training.
“There are sounds I’ve never heard before,” she told People. “I kept saying, ‘I feel my toes,’ because I was so scared I was paralyzed.”
Shields immediately underwent surgery to insert two metal rods, “one from the top of the hip down and another into the hip socket.”
However, the broken portion of the femur soon came out, forcing the Golden Globe-nominated star to undergo a second surgery to “add five rods and a metal plate to anchor it in place.”
“I never considered myself Zen, but I realized with some calm that the rest is up to me now,” she said.
The Battle of Shields did not end here. Two weeks after the second surgery, he developed a staph infection that he feared could be MRSA at the fourth site, where he received three blood transfusions.
“Thank God it wasn’t,” said Shields, 55. “If it had been, my doctor would have said it would have been a race against time. That’s how you can become septic. It seemed unimaginable. ”
Shields re-learned how to walk and documented his physical therapy sessions on Instagram. He started with sessions once a day, but challenged himself to grow to twice a day.
“For the first time in my life, I thought, ‘I can’t feed this,'” she recalls. “I can’t even stand or climb a step. I have to relearn how to go. The feeling of helplessness is shocking. “
But she came in, saying, “If there’s anything, I’m a fighter.”