TERRIFYING

Ashley Judd Says She Waited 55 Hours for ICU Treatment After ‘Harrowing’ Accident in Congo

“I’m in a lot of compassion and I’m in a lot of gratitude,” the actress said during an interview with The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof.

Ashley Judd waited 55 hours to be treated at an ICU after having “shattered a leg in four places” and suffering nerve damage during an expedition in a Congo rainforest, she said during an interview with The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof. According to the actress, who is now hospitalized at a trauma ICU, she broke her leg after tripping over a downed tree. It “started with five hours of lying on the forest floor” where she said she waited with a colleague. “With his leg under my badly misshapen leg, biting my stick,” Judd said, adding that she was in such excruciating pain that she was “howling.” After five hours, she said, someone reset her bones, but she then had to be carried for over an hour on foot and transported via motorcycle and a plane before she was checked in to an ICU in South Africa more than two days after the accident. Judd described the incident as “harrowing.”