Brooke Shields Shares Photos From Her Harrowing Fitness Accident

Brooke Shields shared photos last week from her weeks long stay in the hospital following a fitness accident that broke her femur.

She shared four photos in her ‘Flashback Friday’ post documenting her multiple surgeries and recovery.

“#fbf I’ve come a long way since this, but the journey is just beginning 💫 Read more in @people, on newsstands today,” Shields captioned the post.

In late January, Shields broke her femur at a New York City gym after falling off a balance board.

“It felt like it was all in slow motion. And then I just started screaming,” she told People. “Sounds came out that I’ve never heard before. The pain was so excruciating.”

Shields said she was afraid she would never walk again. She said she kept saying she couldn’t feel her toes because she was afraid she was paralyzed.

She said she had surgery to insert two metal rods,  “one from the top of my hip down, and another across into the hip socket,” she said. According to Shields, the broken portion of her right femur popped out, leading to a second surgery that added five metal rods and metal plate to anchor everything in place.

Shields spent two and a half weeks in the hospital before returning home. While home, she developed a staph infection that landed her back in the hospital where she had emergency surgery on the IV site where she’d had three blood transfusions.

“At first they feared it might be MRSA [a type of bacteria resistant to antibiotics],” 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.”

After going home a second time, she said she was told “Your road is just about to begin.”

“For the first time in my entire life, I thought, ‘I can’t power through this,’ ” she said. “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.”

But Shields said she reminded herself that she is a fighter and focused on how far she has come.

“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.”