By Wonderwall.com Editors
4:46pm PDT, Nov 2, 2023
_
Shortly before she was due on stage to open her solo show in New York City this fall, Brooke Shields suffered a grand mal seizure — then opened her eyes to find Bradley Cooper was holding her hand.
The "Pretty Baby" star opened up about her bizarre (and scary) experience in an interview for Glamour's 2023 Women of the Year edition, which debuted on Nov. 1.
"I had a full-blown grand mal seizure on Thursday before the show," Brooke, 58, told Glamour editor Samantha Barry. "Nobody knows about it," she added.
Click through to see what happened to Brooke and why, then read on to find out how Bradley Cooper ended up being involved …
MORE: Follow Wonderwall on MSN for more celebrity & entertainment photo galleries and content
_
As Brooke Shields revealed to Glamour, she was getting ready to appear at her Cafe Carlyle show "Previously Owned by Brooke Shields" when she first began to feel off.
"I was preparing for the show, and I was drinking so much water, and I didn't know I was low in sodium," she explained. "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 OK?'"
The star was evidently far from OK, but she had no idea something was wrong — at first.
She left the house, but the folks she was with continued to ask questions. "And they kept asking me, 'Do you want coffee?' And I was like, 'No.' 'Are you all right?' I go, 'Yeah, great,'" she recalled. "Then I walked to the corner — no reason at all. I'm like, 'Why am I out here?'"
Finally, she walked inside L'Artusi, a restaurant in the West Village. "And I go to the sommelier who had just taken an hour to watch my run-through," she continued. "I go in, two women come up to me; I don't know them. Everything starts to go black. Then my hands drop to my side and I go headfirst into the wall."
MORE: Peep 25 amazing pics of Brooke Shields dating back to 1978
_
Once she literally hit the wall, Brooke Shields started "having a grand mal seizure," she recalled.
Asked what, exactly, it "means" to have a grand mal seizure, Brooke replied, "It means frothing at the mouth, totally blue, trying to swallow my tongue."
According to the Mayo Clinic, "A tonic-clonic seizure, previously known as a grand mal seizure, causes a loss of consciousness and violent muscle contractions. It's the type of seizure most people picture when they think about seizures." A person suffering from such a seizure experiences muscle stiffness that causes them to fall over, as Brooke did, after which "the muscles alternately flex and relax." Mayo Clinic's website also notes that while epilepsy is "usually" the cause, it can also be "triggered by other health problems" such as "very low blood sugar, a high fever or a stroke."
MORE: Brooke Shields' life and career in pictures
_
After losing consciousness and turning blue from her first-ever seizure, Brooke Shields was in for another shock, albeit a slightly more appealing one.
"The next thing I remember, I'm being loaded into an ambulance. I have oxygen on. And Bradley f****** Cooper is sitting next to me holding my hand," she said.
"I didn't have a sense of humor. I couldn't really get any words out," the model admitted. "But I thought to myself, 'This is what death must be like. 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, and I'm like, 'This is odd and surreal.'"
_
As it turned out, Bradley Cooper's presence in the ambulance was not a sign that Brooke Shields was on her way to the great beyond.
The sommelier at the restaurant she'd wandered into before collapsing initially attempted to contact her husband, Chris Henchy (seen here with the couple's daughters, Rowan and Grier). He had no luck getting ahold of Chris, but his assistant managed to reach another assistant "who eventually called Bradley Cooper, who was nearby," according to Glamour.
"His assistant called Bradley and said, 'Brooke's on the ground. Chris isn't around. Go get her,'" Brooke explained. "And he came, and somebody called the ambulance. And then it was like … I walked in with Jesus," she quipped.
Brooke was in no mood for jokes once she recovered, though, considering her show was about to debut. "[It was] Thursday before the Carlyle. And I kept saying to the doctor, 'You've got to get me better.' And they had the EEGs and things; they thought my brain was seizing. They had catheters; they had IVs. I was stuck," she recalled. "And then they put me into ICU and that's where I got bronchitis."
_
Doctors finally determined the cause of Brooke Shields' stroke: "Low sodium. I had had too much water. I flooded my system, and I drowned myself. And if you don't have enough sodium in your blood or urine or your body, you can have a seizure."
Despite her own recollection about her water intake earlier in the day, Brooke noted that the "male doctors kept asking me if I was limiting my salt," which irked her.
"I've had it with male doctors. I know you're all smart — smarter than I am in what you do. But let me just tell you something: I look younger when I'm bloated. If I'm bloated, people think I've had Botox. So as a 58-year-old woman, I'm not limiting my salt, OK? Stop trying to make me a crazy actress or a female that doesn't know what the f*** they're doing. I was drinking too much water because I felt dehydrated because I was singing more than I've ever sung in my life and doing a show and a podcast," she recalled telling them.
"So they were just like, 'Eat potato chips every day,'" she added.
(Solid medical advice! We'll just say Brooke Shields' doctors made us do it.)
