“Accidents happen – and there was a tree that fell on the road that I did not see, and I had a very strong step and I just fell over this tree,” she told the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof said. “When I broke my leg, I knew it was broken.”
It took an “incredibly disturbing 55 hours” to bring her from the jungle to an operating table in South Africa.
She was stuck on the ground for five hours with a ‘bad shape of the leg’, biting a stick due to pain and ‘crying like a wild animal’.
She was eventually taken on a motorcycle to a trauma unit while holding the upper part of her broken tibia together.
“We did it for six hours,” she recalls. “I was on the verge of my edge.”
The ‘Double Jeopardy’ star and activist spends much of every year in Africa and wanted to use the interview to raise awareness of issues of poverty and animal protection. She was there on a research project on bonobos, a species of endangered primate.
Judd acknowledges the ‘privilege’ that enabled her to receive relatively prompt medical care. “Most people I know would not have had access.”