Brooke Shields Suffers Seizure After Drinking Too Much Water

Brooke Shields is going public with details about a recent health scare she experienced the week before starting her one-woman show at New York’s Café Carlyle in September. The actress told Glamour that she had a “full-blown grand mal seizure” that she believes was caused by drinking too much water.

In an article published Nov. 1, Shields said she had been drinking a lot of water throughout the day and people started to tell her that it looked like something was wrong. Things started to not make sense. She said she walked to a corner for no apparent reason and thought to herself, “Why am I out here?” She then went inside L’Artusi, a Manhattan restaurant, and said others noticed something wasn’t right.

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“Everything starts to go black,” she said in the interview. “Then my hands drop to my side and I go headfirst into the wall.”

She said she started having a grand mal seizure, also know as a tonic-clonic seizure, which included “frothing at the mouth, totally blue, trying to swallow my tongue.”

She remembers being loaded into an ambulance and being given oxygen and said that fellow actor Bradley Cooper was holding her hand. Apparently, he happened to be close by and when he learned what happened, he hurried to the scene and rode in the ambulance with her.

Shields, who has not indicated that she has epilepsy, said she was admitted to the intensive care unit and put on a catheter and IV. She said doctors told her she had too much water and too little salt in her system.

“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.”

Andreas Alexopoulos, M.D., an epilepsy specialist with the Cleveland Clinic, said although it is possible to have a seizure due to not having enough sodium, this is uncommon. Alexopoulus, who did not treat Shields, said that although having adequate hydration is very important — and it is more common for people over age 50 to be dehydrated than overhydrated — “if sodium is significantly low, that may in fact result in a seizure.”

What are seizures and how common are they?

A seizure occurs when many neurons send signals at the same time faster than normal, according to the National Institutes of Health. This surge of excessive electrical activity from nerve cells can cause involuntary movements, sensations, emotions and behaviors.

Epilepsy is a chronic brain disorder in which the brain sometimes sends the wrong signals and causes seizures. Not everyone who has seizures has epilepsy. Some people, for example, may have only one seizure, but those with epilepsy have multiple seizures.

There are different types of seizures. In a grand mal seizure, which Shields says she had, people have full-body convulsions on both sides, and stiffening of muscles. Usually the legs are extended, the eyes may be open and the head flexed forward or backward, Alexopoulos said.

The jerking movements that occur are the symptoms most people associate with seizures, he said, because they are the ones we often see on television or in movies, but they are not the most common seizure types.