Brooke Shields Reveals She Suffered Grand Mal Seizure… And Bradley Cooper Came to the Rescue
Brooke Shields revealed in a new interview that she recently suffered a grand mal seizure and that Bradley Cooper played the unlikely role of hero by accompanying her to the hospital.
Speaking to Glamour about her recent documentary Pretty Baby, a one-woman show and her new podcast, Shields announced at the opening, “I had a full-blown grand mal seizure on Thursday before the show. Nobody knows about it.”
“I was preparing for the show, and I was drinking so much water, and I didn’t know I was low in sodium. 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?'” Shields recalled.
“I drank all this water. I leave my house. And they kept asking me, ‘Do you want coffee?’ And I was like, ‘No.’ ‘Are you all right?’ I go, ‘Yeah, great.’ Then I walked to the corner — no reason at all. I’m like, ‘Why am I out here?’”
Upon entering a New York restaurant, “Everything starts to go black. Then my hands drop to my side and I go headfirst into the wall,” Shields said, adding that she was “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.”
Here’s where the story gets “odd and surreal”: When an employee attempted to reach out to Shields’ husband, Chris Henchy, they instead were rerouted to an assistant and then another assistant and then to… Bradley Cooper, who happened to be nearby. He rushed to the scene and accompanied Shields to the hospital in the ambulance.
“I thought to myself, This is what death must be like,” Shields said. “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.”
Shields added, thankfully, that doctors said the seizure was likely due to low sodium in her system; “Eat potato chips every day,” they told her.