Ashley Judd thanks Congo rescuers, shares accident details

Ashley Judd is thanking the men and women who rescued her in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after she broke her leg in a remote rainforest and who transported her on a more than two-day journey to a hospital.

"Without my Congolese brothers and sisters, my internal bleeding would have likely killed me, and I would have lost my leg," the actress and animal-activist, 52, wrote on Instagram Tuesday, alongside a video and photos of the trek and of her rescuers. "I wake up weeping in gratitude, deeply moved by each person who contributed something life giving and spirit salving during my grueling 55 hour odyssey."

Judd is a longtime supporter of the Bonobo Conservation Initiative and was in the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve to examine those endangered primates. Recalling how she tripped over a tree in the dark, Judd described how a man named Dieumerci "stretched out his leg and put it under my grossly misshapen left leg to try to keep it still. It was broken in four places and had nerve damage." He "remained seated, without fidgeting or flinching, for 5 hours on the rain forest floor. He was with me in my primal pain. He was my witness."

Another man, Papa Jean, "calmly assessed my broken leg. He told me what he had to do. I bit a stick. … And Papa Jean, with certainty began to manipulate and adjust my broken bones back into something like a position I could be transported in, while I screamed and writhed. How he did that so methodically while I was like an animal is beyond me. He saved me. & he had to do this twice!"

Placed into a hammock, she was carried through the jungle by six men "with as little jostling as possible … for 3 hours over rough terrain." She then was taken by motorbike on a six-hour ride "on an irregular, rutted and pocked dirt road." A man named Didier drove while "I sat facing backwards, his back my backrest. When I would begin to slump, to pass out, he would call to me to reset my position to lean on him." Another man, Maradona, "rode on the very back of the motorbike … He held my broken leg under the heel and I held the shattered top part together with my two hands."

The "Divergent" film-series star eventually was flown to Sunninghill Hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa. There, she said in a video for the local newspaper Independent Online, doctors "detected that my leg had no pulse, which was an indicator that perhaps they were going to have to amputate." She thanked several of the medical staff by name for "the top-notch, world-class care that they gave me" that saved her leg.