Brooke Shields recounted a frightening — and very recent — health scare during a November 1 interview with Glamour. The 58-year-old Princeton University graduate suffered from a grand mal seizure, she explained to the publication.
The Suddenly Susan alum described what led to the frightening moment during her conversation with the outlet’s editor-in-chief, Samantha Barry. “I was drinking so much water, and I didn’t know I was low in sodium,” Brooke admitted. “I flooded my system, and I drowned myself, and if you don’t have enough sodium in your blood or urine or your body, you can have a seizure.”
“I was waiting for an Uber; I get down to the bottom of the steps, and I start evidently looking weird, and [the people I was with] were like, ‘Are you OK?’” Brooke remembered. “I go in, two women come up to me; I don’t know them. Everything starts to go black. Then, my hands drop to my side, and I go headfirst into the wall. I start having a grand mal seizure. It means frothing at the mouth, totally blue, trying to swallow my tongue. The next thing I remember, I’m being loaded into an ambulance. I have oxygen on.”
After being loaded into the ambulance, Brooke couldn’t help but notice one Hollywood heartthrob next to her: “f**king Bradley Cooper,” as she put it during her interview.
Since Brooke’s husband, Chris Henchy, wasn’t around to be there for her, his assistant “called Bradley and said, ‘Brooke’s on the ground. Chris isn’t around. Go get her.’”
“And he came, and somebody called the ambulance,” Brooke said. “And then it was like, ‘I walked in with Jesus.’ … I didn’t have a sense of humor. I couldn’t really get any words out. But I thought to myself, ‘This is what death must be like.’ You wake up and Bradley Cooper’s going, ‘I’m going to go to the hospital with you, Brooke,’ and he’s holding my hand.”
The former Hannah Montana actress explained how “odd and surreal” the experience was for her while remembering how Bradley, 48, held her hand. Medical staff believed that Brooke’s “brain was seizing,” but she begged the doctor to “get [her] better.”
“And they had the EEGs and things; they thought my brain was seizing,” she continued. “They had catheters; they had IVs. I was stuck. And then they put me into ICU, and that’s where I got bronchitis.”
Since Brooke’s system was low on salt, she noted that some of the doctors believed that she deliberately limited her sodium intake.
“And then, male doctors kept asking me if I was limiting my salt,” she explained. “And I said, ‘You know what? I’ve had it with male doctors. I know you’re all smart — smarter than I am in what you do. But let me just tell you something: I look younger when I’m bloated. If I’m bloated, people think I’ve had Botox.’ So, as a 58-year-old woman, I’m not limiting my salt, OK? Stop trying to make me a crazy actress or a female that doesn’t know what the f**k they’re doing.”
Toward the end of her harrowing story, Brooke insisted that the reason for her drinking “too much water” was simply “because I felt dehydrated because I was singing more than I’ve ever sung in my life and doing a show and a podcast. So, they were just like, “Eat potato chips every day.’”