Ashley Judd recovering from ‘catastrophic’ fall in Congo rainforest

Ashley Judd is recovering from a “catastrophic” fall — which nearly cost her a leg — she suffered while in doing conservation work in a Congo rainforest.

Judd, 52, described “an incredibly harrowing 55 hours” in an Instagram Live talk with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof from her ICU bed in South Africa. Judd explained that she tripped over a fallen tree in the dark while working to track bonobos, an endangered species of great apes, breaking her leg in four places and leaving her with nerve damage.

Judd’s ordeal — which she said left her “at the very edge of my edge” also included being hand-carried and ferried via motorcycle at points, during which time she bit down on a stick, “howling like a wild animal,” while losing and regaining conscious and repeating a Bible passage. (Psalm 23’s “the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want,” for the curious.)

However, the actress stressed her privilege in being able to access medical care, saying that a Congolese person in the same position would likely not even been removed from the village and would have lost their leg and potentially their life.

“The difference between a Congolese person and me is disaster insurance that allowed me 55 hours after my accident to get to an operating table in South Africa,” she said, noting many villages in the Congo lack not only electricity but medical equipment like painkillers, a point she reiterated in a separate post on her Instagram.

“Bonobos matter,” she said. “And so do the people in whose ancestral forest they range and the other 25,600,000 Congolese in need of humanitarian assistance.”

source: nypost.com