Hayden Panettiere was open about her ongoing physical struggles just months before she passed away at age 36.
Following her death from an apparent overdose in South Carolina on Sunday, fans and friends are looking back at the chronic pain the actress dealt with on a daily basis.
The Stunt That Changed Everything
In her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, which was released in May, the Heroes star revealed she sustained lasting damage from a movie stunt gone wrong. While filming the 2005 movie, Racing Stripes, Panettiere was thrown from a zebra named Sam.
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Hayden Panettiere in Racing Stripes.
©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
“Trusting that he’d always be the angel I knew him to be, I mounted him without a worry in the world,” she wrote. “At first things went fine. But when I approached what we called the ‘mounting pads,’ which were elevated platforms that helped us mount and dismount, Sam bucked — at the exact moment I tried to hop off him,” she continued. “My foot was caught in the stirrup, so my body swung up into the air, then came down hard on the ground. I felt an excruciating pain shoot through my back.”
The accident left her with a concussion, severe whiplash, and two damaged vertebrae in her neck. She was only 14 at the time.
A Loss of Mobility
The physical issues worsened earlier this year. During a May interview with Women’s Health, Panettiere recalled a morning when she woke up numb from the waist down. She couldn’t lift her foot or bend her toes.
“No one was able to give me a solid answer,” she said. “It was like that for so long that I was sitting there going, ‘Oh my gosh, am I going to be paralyzed for the rest of my life?’”
Connecting the Pain to Addiction
That unresolved physical pain eventually led to a long battle with addiction. In her book, Panettiere acknowledged that the discomfort from her neck injury often triggered an increase in her prescription opioid use.
She noted that she was first introduced to drugs at the age of 15, just months after Racing Stripes finished filming, when she was given “happy pills” to maintain a high energy level during press interviews. Looking back on her sudden loss of mobility earlier this year, she admitted the ordeal was “the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me physically, for sure.”
In the memoir — published just three months before she died — the actress made sure her fans finally knew the truth about the physical pain she had been living with since she was 14.
