Ashley Judd shares new photos and excruciating details about Congo crash – Deadline

On Tuesday, Ashley Judd shared many more details – along with a photo gallery – of her heartbreaking experience after suffering a broken leg in the Congolese jungle last week. Specifically, she spoke about the locals who helped her through the ordeal. Without them, she wrote: “My internal bleeding probably would have killed me.”

She revealed that, as she lay in agony on the forest floor, a man named Dieumerci “stretched his leg out and put it under my grossly deformed left leg to try and keep it still. It was broken in four places and had nerve damage. Dieumerci (“Thank you to God”) remained seated, without moving or flinching, for 5 hours on the floor of the tropical forest.

The actress then referred to a scene that seemed straight out of a survival movie. After searching for her for 5 hours, another local man named Papa Jean gave her a stick to bite on, then proceeded to readjust the pieces of her broken leg.

“It took 5 hours, but eventually he found me miserable and savage on the floor, and calmly assessed my broken leg. He told me what to do. I bit a stick. I clung to Maud. And Papa Jean, for sure, started to manipulate and adjust my broken bones into something like a position I could be carried into, as I screamed and twisted. How he did it so methodically when I was like an animal is beyond me. He saved me. “

A group of men then improvised a hammock and spent three hours carefully transporting Judd through the forest to the nearest means of transport.

Next, a heroic friend – aptly named Maradona – volunteered to ride with the failing actress for six hours on a motorcycle, keeping her from falling and keeping her broken foot in place.

“Didier drove the motorcycle. I sat back to back, her back my back. When I started to collapse, to pass out, he would call me to get back in position to lean on him. Maradona got on the back of the bike, I faced her. He held my broken leg under the heel and I held the broken upper part with both hands. Together we did this for 6 hours on an irregular, ornate and pockmarked dirt road that has gullies for the rain flowing during the rainy season. Maradona was the only person to volunteer for this task.

The actress previously recalled that she had passed out and was in shock, repeatedly reciting “the Lord is my Shepherd, I do not want” from Psalm 23.

“The difference between a Congolese and me is a catastrophe insurance which allowed me 55 hours after my accident to go to an operating table in South Africa”, she said, adding that the villages of the Congo not only lack electricity but “a simple pill to kill the pain when you broke your leg in four places and you have nerve damage.

Judd wrote that she decided to speak openly about the accident to spread the word about “what it means to be Congolese in extreme poverty with no access to health care, pain medication, any kind of service. or choice.

The actress now says, from her hospital bed in South Africa, “I wake up crying in gratitude, deeply moved by each person who has brought something invigorating and relieving to the spirit during my grueling odyssey of 55 hours.