Brooke Shields Gives A Health Update After Her Horrifying Accident

Brooke Shields is on the road to recovery after being in a scary accident in February. "I was on one of those balance boards that I have been doing every day," she explained to Today. "It was just something that I like to do. I've done it on Instagram and I stupidly switched my focus and I flew up in the air and just hit perfectly and snapped my femur."

Shields approached the injury in a matter-of-fact way, saying, "This is really probably the biggest thing that I have to physically go through, but what am I going to do about it?" She added, "Am I just going to let it undo me or am I going to take proactive steps towards doing something that is within my capacity?" 

Shortly after the accident, Shields posted a video of herself walking on crutches on Instagram. "Broke my femur," she wrote in the caption. "Beginning to mend. No matter what your challenge is, make a positive choice, for yourself, to move forward. #BeginningisNow."

Shields appeared positive about the injury on social media, but there were many moments of doubt. "I was so afraid I was paralyzed," she admitted to People weeks after the accident. The injury itself was incredibly painful, but Shields also required invasive surgery requiring the insertion of metal rods and a metal plate. Shields spent weeks in the hospital, but she wasn't out of the woods after returning home. After her release, Shields found herself facing a staph infection and she had to return to the hospital where she underwent another surgery.

"At first they feared it might be [antibiotic-resistant] MRSA," she said. "Thank God it wasn't. 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."

The horrifying experience put a lot of things into perspective for Shields, who said, "I never considered myself Zen but I realized with a certain calm that the rest is up to me now."

Shields committed wholeheartedly to the healing process. The actress doubled down on therapy, putting herself through the grueling process twice a day. She said, "for the first time in my entire life, I thought, 'I can't power through this. 'I can't even stand on my leg or go up a step. I need to relearn how to even walk. The feeling of helplessness is shocking."

It has been an arduous journey for Shields, and she's not fully healed yet. "If anything, I'm a fighter," she said. 

Shields is determined to keep going. "I'm the only one that's going to be able to get through this," she said. "My career has actually been like that as well. One door gets slammed in my face and I search for another. It's not unlike how I felt when I wrote about postpartum depression in 2005. This is my journey, and if it took me breaking the largest bone in my body, then recovery is something I want to share. We have to believe in ourselves and encourage one another. There's no other way to get through life, period."

Facing such a severe injury would be daunting under any circumstances, but dealing with one in the midst of a pandemic comes with even more challenges. Broken femur aside, Shields has struggled during the pandemic and with quarantine, opening up about her experiences in an interview with Glamour.

"I've gone through a huge trauma with COVID because of life and nerves and age and everything, that I noticed my hair started thinning," she revealed. "So right now I'm just trying to keep my scalp as healthy as possible. I think all of our bodies have reacted differently [to the trauma] of this year."

In spite of all of the difficulties of the past year, Shields is at least finally learning how to take some time for herself. She also told the outlet that she has "never been really good at relaxing, and it took COVID to really distill everything for me." She continued, "So I like being up earlier in the morning, when it's quiet. I like reading. I'm getting to a point now where knitting doesn't stress me out because if I make a mistake, I'm getting better at being able to fix it. And my girls and I do puzzles... We're finding joy in rituals and self-care, because God knows nobody else is going to do it for you, so you better do it yourself."