How Kaley Cuoco Is Embracing Scars From an Accident That Nearly Took Her Leg

All scars have a story, and Kaley Cuoco’s lower left leg bears a fairly significant one, she recently revealed on the SmartLess podcast, cohosted by Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes. Thirteen years after an equestrian accident nearly took the actor’s leg, she embraces what the harrowing injury left behind.

“I’ve got some good scars,” she said, per People. “It makes you’re feeling like a badass.”

All the accident is recounted by Cuoco and The Big Bang Theory creator Chuck Lorre within the oral history book The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series. As an experienced horse rider and jumper, Cuoco competed often. In 2010, while riding at a Los Angeles ranch, her horse got spooked, threw her off, and stepped on her left leg, leaving her with a compound fracture of her tibia-fibula—a “horrible, horrible, horrible break” by which her bones penetrated through the skin of her lower leg, Cuoco said on the podcast. 

“I remember clear as day, since it takes a second when something is that bad,” Cuoco told Bateman, Arnett, and Hayes. “I used to be like, ‘Did I just fall on a complete thing of leaves?’ Because I heard all of the cracking. It took me like 5 or 10 seconds to really understand it wasn’t just 400 leaves; it was my bones.”

A compound fracture is characterised by an open wound within the skin near a broken bone, per the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons (AAOS). The severity of such a injury can vary significantly, but in “high-energy” accidents, when there is obvious skin damage or the bone is protruding, the soft tissues around the realm, just like the muscles and tendons, are at immediate risk of contamination (think: grass, mud, clothing) and due to this fact a serious infection.

Thankfully, Lorre was in attendance, People reported, and he knew a physician affiliated with Kerlan Jobe Orthopedic Clinic for Sports Medicine at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, whom he contacted immediately. Inside two hours of her fall, Cuoco was “in surgery with one of the best surgeons available to stop an infection because her leg was wide open,” Lorre recalled.

Prior to entering surgery, though, Cuoco was forced to face the injury’s severity head-on. “They made me sign something that said, ‘We don’t know until we get in there and see this leg, and it could come out that you simply don’t have it anymore,’” she said. To her relief, she woke up from the operation and looked right down to find her leg still attached. 

Doctors weren’t sure when she would walk again, and, based on the AAOS, it could actually take as much as six months for a tibial fracture to heal—sometimes longer for open fractures. Surprisingly, inside every week, Cuoco was walking with a boot. “I used to be back to work in two weeks,” she said on the podcast. “It was, like, miraculous.” To this present day, she still carries the metal pins and rods inserted in her leg during surgery.

“Every little thing ended up tremendous,” she said within the oral history book. “And naturally…everyone was freaking out, which I get. It scared people.”

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