Brooke Shields suffered a staph infection after two surgeries to repair her broken thighbone.
© Bang Showbiz
Brookes Shields
The 55-year-old actress fractured her right thigh at a New York gym in January after falling off a balance board. She initially underwent two separate operations to heal the broken bones.
When describing the horror case in detail, she said, “It felt like everything was in slow motion. And then I just started screaming. It made noises I had never heard before.”
Brooke said she was “scared [she] was paralyzed at first, ”but kept telling the doctors that she could still feel her toes.
The actress then had surgery to insert two metal rods, “one from the top of my hip down and another into the acetabulum,” but after the broken part of her right femur popped out, she immediately underwent a second operation to insert five rods and added a metal plate to anchor everything in place.
And after nearly three weeks in the hospital, Brooke was finally sent home where she developed a very severe staph infection that required her to return for emergency surgery at the IV site where she had three blood transfusions.
She explained, “At first they feared it might be MRSA [a type of bacteria resistant to antibiotics]. Thank god it wasn’t. If it had, my doctor would have said it was a race against time. This is how you can get septic. It seemed unthinkable. ”
The ‘Pretty Baby’ star has to learn to walk again and has said that she sometimes feels “helpless”.
She added: “For the first time in my life, I thought, ‘I can’t go through with this.’ I can’t even stand on my leg or take a step up. I have to relearn how to walk. The feeling of helplessness is shocking. ”
But the actress is determined to get her way.
Speaking to People magazine, she said, “If anything, I’m a fighter.
“I’m the only one who can get through this. My career was like that too. A door is slammed in my face and I look for another. It’s no different from how I felt when I wrote about postpartum depression in 2005. This is my journey, and when I break the biggest bone in my body then I want to share the recovery. We have to believe in ourselves and encourage one another. There’s no other way to get through life, period. “
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