There’s an old AP Statistics joke meant to illustrate the fallacy of conflating correlation and causation that goes something like this: “Every person who has died in a car crash drank water within the week of the fatal accident.”
Obviously, despite the nigh 100 percent correlation of people who drink water and people who die in vehicular accidents, it would be foolish to suggest that water played any sort of causal role in death.
For longtime actress and model Brooke Shields, it would be anything but foolish to suggest that everyday drinking water did, in fact, trigger a wild health scare in her recently.
Speaking to Glamour magazine to help promote her new one-woman show in New York City, Shields revealed that she suffered a “full-blown grand mal seizure” a week before the show’s opening in September.
And it was all because she drank water.
“I was preparing for the show, and I was drinking so much water, and I didn’t know I was low in sodium,” Shields told Glamour editor-in-chief Samantha Barry. “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 revealed that “Nobody knows about” this particular health scare — except for, very randomly, actor Bradley Cooper.
Shields explained that after people asked if she was okay (she told them she was “great” at the time), she aimlessly wandered around the restaurant L’Artusi (“Why am I out here?” she wondered to herself, apparently) before entering the eatery proper.
It was here that things took a bad turn and when Cooper entered the picture.
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“Then my hands drop to my side and I go headfirst into the wall,” Shields told Glamour.
Scarily, the 58-year-old added that she was “frothing at the mouth, totally blue, trying to swallow my tongue.”
After blacking out, Shields woke in an ambulance to find Cooper, of all people, hovering over her prone self.
“The next thing I remember, I’m being loaded into an ambulance. I have oxygen on,” Shields said. “And Bradley f***ing Cooper is sitting next to me holding my hand.”
Apparently, when bystanders saw Shields’ seizure, people in the know swiftly tried to contact her husband, but were unable to.
The ensuring game of phone tag apparently roped in Cooper.
“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,” Shields said. “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 to what exactly happened to trigger this out-of-body experience for Shields, it was, again, water.
“I flooded my system, and I drowned myself,” she told Glamour. “And if you don’t have enough sodium in your blood or urine or your body, you can have a seizure.”
To the envy of most everyday Americans, her doctor’s prescription to counteract her dangerously low sodium levels: “Eat potato chips every day.”
As to the health scare itself, Shields’ description of it as a “mal seizure” is accurate, if a tad outdated.
According to the Mayo Clinic, the current accepted term for it is a “tonic-clonic seizure.”
The name of the seizure comes from the two phases of it:
- The tonic phase: This is where the “blackout” or loss of consciousness occurs.
- The clonic phase: This is where the muscles start spasming.
Shields was recently named one of the co-women of the year by Glamour.
