Brooke Shields feared she would become paralyzed after fracturing her femur in January – and in her recovery was in danger of dying from a harrowing staph infection, according to a new interview.
The “Suddenly Susan” star said “survival mode began” as soon as she fell off a balance board at a New York gym and suffered a serious training injury.
“There were sounds coming out that I have never heard before,” she recalled to People. “I kept saying, ‘I can 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 my hip down, and another across the hip socket.”
However, the fractured part of her femur quickly emerged, forcing the Golden Globe-nominated star to undergo a second operation to “add five rods and a metal plate to anchor everything in place.”
“I never thought of myself as Zen, but I realized with a certain calm that the rest is now up to me,” she said.
Shields’ fight didn’t end there. Two weeks after her second surgery, she developed a staph infection that they feared could be MRSA at the IV site where she received three blood transfusions.
“Thank goodness it wasn’t,” Shields, 55, said. “If it had, my doctor said it would have been a race against time. That’s how you can get infected. It seemed unthinkable. “
Shields has learned to walk again and is documenting her physical therapy sessions on Instagram. She started with once-a-day sessions, but challenged herself to increase this to twice a day.
“For the first time in my life I thought, I can’t get through this,” she recalls. ‘I can’t even stand on my leg or go up one step. I have to learn to walk again. The feeling of helplessness is shocking. “
But she pushed through and said, “At least I’m a fighter.”