Brooke Shields, 58, is opening up about a health scare she suffered in the beginning of September, just days before the opening of her one-woman show, “Previously Owned by Brooke Shields.”
“I had a full-blown grand mal seizure on Thursday before the show. Nobody knows about it,” she told Glamour.
Until now.
The actress and model said she was preparing for her show and “drinking so much water” that she didn’t realize her sodium levels were low.
“I was waiting for an Uber,” she recalled. “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 okay?'”
Shields said she left her house, walked to the street corner, and questioned what she was doing.
The people she was with continued to ask if she was okay or wanted anything, and she insisted she was fine.
“Then I walk into the restaurant L’Artusi, and I go to the sommelier who had just taken an hour to watch my run-through. 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,” Shields said. “It means frothing at the mouth, totally blue, trying to swallow my tongue.”
The next thing Shields remembered was being loaded into the ambulance with oxygen and “Bradley f**king Cooper” sitting next to her holding her hand.
“This is what death must be like,” she thought to herself. “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. And I’m looking at my hand, I’m looking at Bradley Cooper’s hand in my hand, and I’m like, ‘This is odd and surreal.'”
It turned out the sommelier attempted to get in touch with Shields’ husband, but couldn’t. Instead an assistant got ahold of another assistant who contacted Bradley Cooper who was nearby.
After being placed in the ICU and undergoing several tests doctors determined the cause of Shields’ seizure.
“Low sodium,” she said. “I had had too much water. 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.”
While the male doctors kept asking if she was limiting her salt intake, Shields insisted that was not the case. Since she had been singing and taping a podcast she had been feeling dehydrated so she was drinking more water than usual.
“Stop trying to make me a crazy actress or a female that doesn’t know what the f— they’re doing,” she said. “I was drinking too much water 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.'”
A grand mal seizure is extremely frightening for not only the person who is seizing, but for those around them.
Hopefully this serves as a reminder to everyone to be careful about their water intake.
READ MORE:
- Inside Brooke Shields’ first marriage with famous ex – and the horrifying reason why it ended
- Brooke Shields reveals she was sexually assaulted by Hollywood executive more than 30 years ago
