Los Angeles, June 12 Hollywood star Jeremy Renner felt as if he was "on fire and electrocuted and melting" all at once after his snow plough accident. He shared that he had nothing to do but "breathe" his way through the pain.
The 54-year-old actor broke 38 bones in his body and sustained a collapsed lung and lacerated liver after being crushed by his snowcat in January 2023.
Speaking on UK TV show The One Show, Renner said: "What is the alternative in that situation when your nerve-endings are on fire, and electrocuted and melting, and drowning, all of it all at once, it was confusing.
"The only thing I wasn't doing was breathing, pain is just pain, essentially, so I had to breathe otherwise I would pass out, my organs would fail and I'd die. That's why the book is the My Next Breath, it's the fight to exhale, then inhale, not realising that the ribcage is collapsed and the lung was punctured.”
The actor added: “My eyeball came out, when you can see your eye with your other eye, it's like 'Okay...'"
Renner is the oldest of seven siblings, and recalled that attending antenatal classes with his mother when she was pregnant was what gave him the power to know just how important breath control was in that moment, reports femalefirst.co.uk.
He said: "Not a lot of 12-year-old boys get that opportunity, but, ironically, it was probably the thing that gave me the confidence to understand the power that you're mitigating pain with breath.
"And believing in that, knowing that, seeing it first hand with my mom in labour. Feeding her ice chips to get her to breathe right and all these things.”
The actor said that was essentially what he had to do.
“I had to breathe to stay alive, but it also helped mitigate my pain. It took so much energy to focus on the breath that I didn't have to worry about my eye or my twisted-up legs or that the bones were broken. I wasn't even focusing on or feeling that, I had to breathe.
He added: "If you can't breathe, you're drowning, right? It doesn't take very much time to drown so when you're there for 45 minutes, you're really trying to figure out your next breath and that's all that mattered. I don't even call it an accident because it wasn't, it was an incident."
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