On Friday, actress Ashley Judd revealed that she was involved in a “catastrophic accident” in the Congo rainforest and almost lost her leg.
The humanitarian spoke from an ICU bed on an Instagram Live video with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on the “harrowing” experience, which left her with a shattered leg in four places and nerve damage, the Hollywood Reporter reported.
“I was doing what I always do, up at 4:30 in the morning with two of our trackers who are just these world-class, brilliant, brilliant men, walking in the dark, and my headlamp had new batteries, but it was a little faint, it wasn’t working quite properly — I’ve come down half-dome in Yosemite under a full moon, I can walk in partial light, but accidents happen — and there was a fallen tree on the path which I didn’t see, and I had a very powerful stride going, and I just fell over this tree. As I was breaking my leg, I knew it was being broken, I cried out to Maude who was one of the researchers working with me,” said Judd.
The actress was in the Congo on a research project on endangered bonobos—ape-like animals that she described as “egalitarian, matriarchal, peaceful.”
“What was next was an incredibly harrowing 55 hours,” Judd continued, explaining that for the first five hours of the ordeal, she laid on the forest floor with her “badly misshapen leg,” biting on a stick because of the pain and “howling like a wild animal.” She said her teeth were chattering, and she had broken out in a cold sweat.
There was no ambulance service, and she had to be transported to a South African trauma unit via motorbike. Judd described holding together the top part of her shattered tibia.
“We did that for six hours,” she recalled. “I was at the edge of my very edge.”
Judd mentioned her privilege during the interview, saying that she was able to get on an operating table before it was too late because of her disaster insurance. A privilege Congolese people don’t always have.
Judd spoke on her interview with Kristof on her own Instagram page, shedding light on “what it means to be Congolese in extreme poverty with no access to health care, any medication for pain, any type of service, or choices.”
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