Ashley Judd is recovering from a “catastrophic” fall that nearly cost her a leg, which she suffered while doing conservation work in a Congo rainforest.
Judd, 52, described “about 55 incredibly distressing hours” in an Instagram Live chat with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, from the ICU bed in South Africa. Judd explained that he stumbled upon a fallen tree in the dark while working to track down the bonobos, a kind of endangered great ape, which broke his leg in four places and left him with nerve damage.
Judd’s ordeal, which he said left him “on the edge of my edge,” also included being hand-transported and transported across the motorcycle by points, during which he bit a stick, “howling like a wild animal,” as he lost and regained consciousness and repeated a biblical passage. (Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd, I will not,” for the curious).
However, the actress stressed her privilege of being able to access medical care, saying a Congolese person in the same position would probably not even be far from the village and would have lost her leg and potentially lost her life.
“The difference between a Congolese person and me is a disaster insurance that allowed me 55 hours after my accident to reach a table of operations in South Africa,” he said, noting that many people in the Congo not only do not have electricity, but also medical equipment such as painkillers, a point he reiterated in a separate post on his Instagram.
“Bonobos are important,” he said. “And so do the people in whose ancestral forest they are and the other 25,600,000 Congolese who need humanitarian aid.”