Brooke Shields Recalls the Insulting Question Asked by 2 Male Doctors After Her Grand Mal Seizure

Mar. 15, 2025

On Monday, Jan. 13, the model-actress appeared onGood Morning Americaand opened up about why she decided to touch on women’s experience in the healthcare system in her new book,Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old.

“Women go through stuff. We need to be able to say, ‘This isn’t fair.’ We need to be able to self-advocate,” she said.

“I had a seizure not too long ago and the two male doctors said, ‘Are you restricting yourself for dietary reasons?’ And I was like, ‘No. I’m a 59-year-old woman who looks younger bloated. Give me some potato chips!’ You wouldn’t say that to a man.”

Shields gets candid in her book about aging and claiming agency over her body. She even writes about the moment she discovered she underwent a medical procedure she didn’t consent to.

ABC News correspondentRebecca Jarvisasked on the show if anything scares Shields at this point in her life.

“No,” Shields replied. “I would be very disingenuous if I didn’t come to share my truth.”

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Brooke Shields.Taylor Hill/Getty

Taylor Hill/Getty

“I was preparing for the show, and I was drinking so much water, and I didn’t know I was low in sodium,” sherecalled. “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?' "

Brooke Shields.Gilbert Carrasquillo/GC Images

Gilbert Carrasquillo/GC Images

“I go to the sommelier who had just taken an hour to watch my run-through… Everything starts to go black. Then my hands drop to my side and I go headfirst into the wall,” the actress said at the time.

That was when the grand mal seizure started, describing it as “frothing at the mouth, totally blue, trying to swallow my tongue.”

“The next thing I remember, I’m being loaded into an ambulance. I have oxygen on. And Bradley f—ing Cooper is sitting next to me holding my hand,” she shared.

Ultimately, Shields said that doctors determined that “low sodium" caused the seizure after she consumed “too much water.” “I drowned myself. And if you don’t have enough sodium in your blood or urine or your body, you can have a seizure.”

source: people.com