Ashley Judd is on the road to recovery. The 53-year-old actress took to Instagram on Saturday to give fans an update on her leg injury, which she sustained in February while researching the Bonobos, a unique species of ape, in the Congo region of Africa.
Judd began her post with a quote by Colette Werden, which reads, “It’s OK if you fall down and lose your spark. Just make sure that when you get back up, you rise as the whole damn fire.”
“I am getting back up,” Judd wrote alongside photos of her grueling recovery. “I remember when I began sleeping through the night. I remember when I began to have dreams again (both kinds).”
Judd shared photos of herself trying to stretch and move her injured leg to explain all the progress she’s made thus far.
“With the kind of injury I (and many others) have, we speak of degrees. In the video, 109 degrees was an outrageous dream, & trying to reach it was agony,” she wrote. “I did 60 of those heel slides a day. I sobbed through them. I made it because of the loving exhortation and validation of my many friends.”
“Yesterday, I effortlessly reached the benchmark of 130 degrees,” she continued. “I can nearly reach my knee as you see in one picture. My feet can rest almost parallel. The knee is coming along, the four fractures healing.”
While Judd noted that her “peroneal nerve injury will take at least a year” to heal, she wrote that “come June, I will walk with a brace and a cane.”
Judd doesn’t intend to let her injury slow her down, though. In fact, the actress shared a photo of herself holding a book on trekking in Patagonia, writing, “Look out, Patagonia, because when that nerve heals, you’ll be seeing me.”
“My Partner gave me that book for my recent birthday,” she wrote. “I believe. Just as that little endangered bonobo knows that she’ll be seeing me back in the Congolese rain forest soon.”
Judd ended her post with a Bible passage, which reads, “Blessed are those whose strength is in you Who have set their hearts on a pilgrimage Passing through the valley of Weeping They make it a place of springs.”
Following Judd’s February accident that shattered her leg, she was transported to a hospital in South Africa after a 55-hour rescue, which involved six men carrying her to safety. When Judd made it back to the U.S., she underwent an eight-hour surgery to repair her leg.
Following the surgery, Judd noted that she was “up and around already.”
In a March Instagram post, she wrote about her recovery and the support she’s received from friends and family.
“I am in the bosom of a stream of friends and family, too numerous to mention, who have caught me in their prodigious arms from this precipitous fall,” Judd said. “They do for me what I cannot do for myself – prepare meals, shampoo my hair, and they also offer the deep spiritual direction and consolation of trying to begin to craft an arc of meaning and purpose. They also offer and meet my need for quiet. I am lost and they are my shepherd’s staff.”
She also thanked those who sent her well wishes, writing, “Thank you, all here and everywhere, for the goodwill, and may we ever be mindful of the needs of others.”
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