Brooke Shields has revealed that she secretly suffered a terrifying seizure and started ‘frothing at the mouth’, before Bradley Cooper rushed her to hospital.
was hit with worrying health issues in September, days before she was due to open a solo show at the Café Carlyle in .
Detailing her scare in a new interview, the 58-year-old explained that she had been drinking ‘so much water’ that she became ‘low in sodium’.
Speaking to as part of their Woman of the Year series, Brooke said that she left her home to wait for an and ‘evidently looked weird’, before making her way to restaurant L’Artusi, where she was approached by two women that she didn’t know.
‘Everything starts to go black. Then my hands drop to my side and I go headfirst into the wall,’ she recalled. ‘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.
‘And Bradley f**king Cooper is sitting next to me holding my hand.’
Unpacking the scene, Brooke said that the sommelier at the restaurant tried to reach her husband, Chris Henchy but instead an assistant reached another assistant, who then got in contact with the Maestro actor as he happened to be nearby.
‘He came, and somebody called the ambulance. And then it was like, I walked in with Jesus,’ she continued. ‘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. 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.”’
The Friends star revealed that she had consumed too much water and not enough sodium, which ‘flooded’ her system and led to seizures – with doctors eventually informing her to ‘eat more crisps’ as a result.
Despite the illness, she only had one thing on her mind – making sure that she had recovered in time for her solo show.
‘I kept saying to the doctor, “You’ve got to get me better.” And they had the EEGs and things; they thought my brain was seizing,’ she added. ‘They had catheters; they had IVs. I was stuck. And then they put me into ICU and that’s where I got bronchitis.’
Brooke managed to recuperate and made it on stage for her first performance on September 12 – with her run of dates coming to an end the following week.
