Brooke Shields feared she would die after contracting a staph infection following two surgeries and three blood transfusions to fix her broken leg.
The Blue Lagoon star has been learning to walk again after breaking her femur in a balance board accident in a New York gym in January, but she admitted her health emergency was a lot more serious than she had previously let on, after going public with her rehabilitation work last month.
In a new interview with People.com, Shields explained her survival instincts "kicked in" soon after experiencing the excruciating pain that shot through her body as she landed hard on her right leg, and she was relieved to still have feeling in her feet.
"Sounds came out that I've never heard before," she recalled of the immediate aftermath of her accident, remembering: "I kept saying, 'I can feel my toes' because I was so afraid I was paralysed."
Shields was rushed into surgery to have two metal rods inserted into her limb: "One from the top of my hip down, and another across into the hip socket," she shared, but it wasn't enough to keep her shattered bone in place, and she had to endure a second operation, during which doctors had to "add five rods and a metal plate to anchor it all in place".
"I never considered myself Zen, but I realised with a certain calm that the rest is up to me now," she said.
The star, whose husband, producer Chris Henchy, and two daughters were unable to visit her in hospital due to COVID restrictions, needed to keep her emotions in check as she subsequently developed a staph infection where she had her intravenous tube for her blood transfusions - and medics were concerned it was the super bug MRSA, which can be life-threatening as it's resistant to antibiotics.
"Thank God it wasn't," Shields mused: "If it had been, my doctor said it would have been a race against time. That's how you can become septic. It seemed unthinkable."
