“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***ing Cooper is sitting next to me holding my hand.”
She explained that the restaurant’s sommelier had tried to contact her husband Chris Henchy, but was passed on to an assistant who called the actor, who happened to be in the area.
“He came, and somebody called the ambulance. And then it was like, I walked in with Jesus. I didn’t have a sense of humour. I couldn’t really get any words out,” she continued.
“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 actress had consumed too much water and not enough sodium, causing her system to “flood” and resulting in the seizure. Doctors told her to “eat more crisps” to boost her sodium levels.
But despite her condition, she recalls thinking of only one thing - recovering in time for her show.
“I kept saying to the doctor, ‘You’ve got to get me better’,” Shields said.
“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.”
The star eventually recovered and made it to the stage for her performance on September 12.
