Ashley Judd has described a harrowing incident in which she claims she nearly lost her leg after slipping in the Congolese rainforest and needing to be saved by motorcycle.

The actor said she was pinned on the ground for five hours with a “badly misshapen leg,” biting a stick out of anguish, and “howling like a wild animal” in one of two Instagram Live broadcasts presented by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on Friday.

“She was in a really horrible accident in Congo and we’re going to talk about that, but also about lessons learned and what we can do to improve health there,” Kristof stated before Judd joined the first Instagram Live. “I think the idea is to pivot from what happened to Ashley to make it a broader conversation.”

Judd, 52, was searching for bonobos with a group of researchers when she stumbled over a log, fracturing her tibia.

She was hauled back to camp on a hammock from the rainforest.

(Photo: Ashley Judd via Instagram)

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Judd went on a six-hour motorcycle trip after that, during which she had to “physically hold the top part of my shattered tibia together,” she claimed.

“I was doing what I always do, up at 4:30 in the morning with two of our trackers who are just these world class, brilliant, brilliant men, walking in the dark, and my headlamp had new batteries, but it was a little faint, it wasn’t working quite properly — I’ve come down half-dome in Yosemite under a full moon, I can walk in partial light, but accidents happen — and there was a fallen tree on the path which I didn’t see and I had a very powerful stride going and I just fell over this tree. As I was breaking my leg, I knew it was being broken, I cried out to Maude who was one of the researchers working with me ,” Judd recalled, adding that she understood what an evacuation in the rainforest would involve.

She was interviewed from a hospital bed in South Africa, where she confessed that if she hadn’t been a famous performer, she believes she would have lost her leg and her life during the 55-hour experience.

Ashley Judd. JP Yim/Getty Images

“The difference between a Congolese person and me is disaster insurance that allowed me 55 hours after my accident to get to an operating table in South Africa,” she explained.

According to Judd, pervasive poverty in Congo means that many people don’t have access to power or running water, let alone “a simple pill to kill the pain when you’ve shattered a leg in four places and have nerve damage.”

One of the motivations for relaying her tale, according to Judd, is to raise awareness about the conservation work she works with bonobos in the Congo’s jungles.

“They’re highly endangered. There are about 15,000 left and they exist only in the Congo,” she claimed, referring to them as our “closest living relatives” because of their human-like characteristics.  “We have a lot to learn from them.”