Brooke Shields Feels “So Lucky To Be Alive” After Suffering Severe Leg Injury & Staph Infection

A leg injury back in January left Brooke Shields with a shattered femur. An injury of this sort required extensive surgery and implants to help heal the gym injury, which she sustained in January. That wasn’t the full extent of her close calls with extreme situations, though.

Later, Shields battled a staph infection and required hospitalization for that. All this while the coronavirus pandemic raged on in neighborhoods, popular venues, and – especially – hospitals. As a result, her family could not visit. Through all this, Shields finds a way to feel gratitude.

Brooke Shields suffers an extreme leg injury

In January, a gym routine led to an intense leg injury for Brooke Shields. “I flew up in the air with such force,” she outlined, “and I landed so heavy and so hard, and with such musculature and such velocity and such heights on my hip. And it just snapped it.”

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The resulting pain was unlike anything the mother of two had ever experienced. Shields, 55, shared, “I don’t remember how I was, I just started screaming. I was just screaming, And I’ve never screamed like that. Not even in childbirth.”

Between this and a Staph infection, Brooke Shields just feels lucky she’s still alive

Ultimately, Shields, 55, needed seven metal rods and a plate put into her leg to help heal her injury. Then, she ended up suffering from a Staph infection, a bacterial infection caused by the staphylococcus bacteria. It is traditionally associated with the outer surface of the skin or in the nose, even among healthy individuals. That made Shields require further hospitalization, and because of safety protocols at the time, her daughters Rowan, 17, and Grier, 14, and husband Chris Hency, 57, could not visit.

It was when her children asked “if I thought I was gonna die” that fear set in for Shields. From the safety of the present, Shields can look back and feel “the biggest blessing to date because I realize what a fighter I am.” Ultimately, she concluded, “There are so many things that could’ve happened, I just feel so lucky. I feel so lucky to be alive.”

The model-turned-movie star leaves her family and fans with this advice: “If I can turn it into anything positive or I can teach my girls, yeah, stuff’s gonna happen in your life. And how you respond is gonna define you,” she said. “Adversity will reveal you. It won’t make you as much as it will reveal you. ‘Cause you see who you are, you see what you’re made up of.”