*Actress Ashley Judd is speaking out about her “grueling” 55-hour rescue in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after shattering her leg.
On Tuesday, Judd shared photos from the experience on her Instagram, explaining how she injured herself in the jungle. In a lengthy message, she praised “my Congolese brothers and sisters” who helped care for her.
“Friends. Without my Congolese brothers and sisters, my internal bleeding would have likely killed me, and I would have lost my leg,” she wrote in the caption. “I wake up weeping in gratitude, deeply moved by each person who contributed something life giving and spirit salving during my grueling 55 hour odyssey.”
Check out her post below.
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Judd said a man named Dieumerci “stretched out his leg and put it under my grossly misshapen left leg to try to keep it still.”
Her leg “was broken in four places and had nerve damage,” she wrote and said by the time another man showed up to help transport her out of the jungle, she was “wretched and wild on the ground.”
Six men carried her on an improvised hammock, walking “for 3 hours over rough terrain” until they reached two men named Didier and Maradona who rode with Judd on a motorbike for six hours to safety.
“Didier and Maradona: Didier drove the motorbike. I sat facing backwards, his back my backrest,” she recalled. “When I would begin to slump, to pass out, he would call to me to re-set my position to lean on him.”
“Maradona rode on the very back of the motorbike, i faced him. He held my broken leg under the heel and I held the shattered top part together with my two hands,” Judd wrote. “Together we did this for 6 hours on an irregular, rutted and pocked dirt road that has gullies for rain run off during the rainy season. Maradona was the only person to come forward to volunteer for this task.”
