Ashley Judd is recovering and reflecting on a harrowing ordeal, sharing photos of her “grueling 55-hour” rescue after a “catastrophic” fall in a Congo rainforest.
According to the New York Post, the 52-year-old actress shared a series of photos that detailed her rescue, telling her nearly 500,000 followers that “without my Congolese brothers and sisters, my internal bleeding would have likely killed me, and I would have lost my leg.”
Judd is very lucky to be alive and told her followers, “I wake up weeping in gratitude, deeply moved by each person who contributed something life-giving and spirit salving during my grueling 55-hour odyssey.” Judd was working in the Congo to track Bonobos, an endangered species of great apes, when she broke her leg in four places and sustained nerve damage after tripping over a fallen tree in the dark of night.
Judd shared her gratitude, speaking about those who helped her during this extremely difficult ordeal.
“Dieumerci stretched out his leg and put it under my grossly misshapen left leg to try to keep it still. It was broken in four places and had nerve damage. Dieumerci (‘Thanks be to God’) remained seated, without fidgeting or flinching, for 5 hours on the rain forest floor. He was with me in my primal pain. He was my witness,” Judd recalled.
Judd also shared that a man named Papa Jean, discovered her after a five-hour search, and “calmly assessed” her broken leg.
“He told me what he had to do. I bit a stick. I held onto Maud. And Papa Jean, with certainty began to manipulate and adjust my broken bones back into something like a position I could be transported in, while I screamed and writhed,” Judd described. “How he did that so methodically while I was like an animal is beyond me. He saved me. & he had to do this twice!”
A group of six men then “carefully moved” her into a hammock, “with as little jostling as possible,” and walked for three hours “over rough terrain” to carry her out to safety.
Last week, Judd spoke about the traumatic accident from a bed in South Africa, and acknowledged her “privilege” in accessing top medical care, as she noted a Congolese person could have potentially lost their leg or their life, if they suffered the same fate.
