Brooke Shields Reveals the Unexpected Celeb Who Helped Her Through a Grand Mal Seizure
From releasing a documentary to premiering her one-woman cabaret show, Brooke Shields has had a busy year. The 58-year-old is as booked as ever and was just named as one of Glamour‘s “Extraordinary Women” of 2023. But there was one event this year the actress could’ve done without: a seizure that struck the week before she debuted her show.
“I had a full-blown grand mal seizure on Thursday before the show,” Shields told Glamour. It happened, she explained, while she was prepping for the performance in New York City and “drinking so much water.”
“I didn’t know I was low in sodium,” Shields continued. “I was waiting for an Uber. 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?'” She wandered out to a corner for “no reason at all. I’m like, ‘Why am I out here?'”
Shields made it into a restaurant before “everything starts to go black,” she recalled. “Then my hands drop to my side and I go headfirst into the wall.”
Shields was “frothing at the mouth, totally blue, trying to swallow my tongue. The next thing I remember, I’m being loaded into an ambulance,” she said. “I have oxygen on.”
A strange sequence of events led to Bradley Cooper, a friend of Shields’, being in the ambulance with her. After failing to reach Shields’ husband, Chris Henchy, a restaurant employee got in touch with an assistant, who reached out to another assistant, who then contacted Cooper, who happened to be nearby.
At the time, all Shields knew was that she was suddenly in an ambulance “and Bradley fucking Cooper is sitting next to me holding my hand.”
While it’s funny in an absurd way now, Shields said “I didn’t have a sense of humor” in the moment. “I couldn’t really get any words out,” she recalled. “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.'”
Shields was understandably eager to get better before her show. “[The doctors] had the EEGs and things; they thought my brain was seizing. They had catheters; they had IVs. I was stuck. And then they put me into ICU and that’s where I got bronchitis.”
Eventually, the cause of the seizure became clear. Shields, having drank so much water in the lead-up to the show, was low on sodium.
“I flooded my system, and I drowned myself,” she explained. “And if you don’t have enough sodium in your blood or urine or your body, you can have a seizure… 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.”
The seizure Shields experienced, formerly known as a grand mal seizure and now called a tonic-clonic seizure, typically causes people to lose consciousness and experience “violent muscle contractions,” according to Mayo Clinic. Tonic-clonic seizures are often caused by epilepsy, but can also be triggered by other health problems, including a high fever, stroke, and low levels of glucose, sodium, calcium, or magnesium in the blood.
Shields is only now talking about the seizure, which occurred before she opened the cabaret show in September, but the actress has long been open about her health scares and experiences. That includes brushes with skin cancer, precancerous cervical dysplasia, and a difficult journey with postpartum depression. She wrote a book in 2005 about the latter, and says people still thank her for her openness about it. “They go, ‘I had it so bad and I didn’t know. And I felt like I was so wrong and my husband didn’t understand and I felt so guilty.’ And the tears, and it’s like, God, I feel for you. Because they carry it with them, and you carry a lot of guilt about it.”
“Women need to hear this,” Shields added. “They need to know, because it’s scary.”
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