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Like many former child stars, Melissa Gilbert has had a rough go of it at times. Turbulent romances, substance abuse issues, wild living, etc. (Paging LiLo?)
Recently while on tour for months as the character of “Ma” with the “Little House On The Prairie” musical—oy!— the 46-year-old actress struggled with back pain.
Like a trooper, she carried on.
But when the tour ended earlier this month, she met with a neurosurgeon. “He came in and said, `Your back is broken, and it has been for months,’” said Ms. Gilbert. “I sort of was in shock for a while.”
Didn’t the woman best known as the girl Laura Ingalls know that she broke her back? Where’s that hardscrabble prairie common sense?!
“I would balk and fight [the back pain] and say, ‘I’ve got to do the show,’” she said. “If it got really bad and I lost feeling in my legs or couldn’t move, I’d go to the ER. … I thought doing a musical at 46 playing a woman in her late 20s, early 30s, was amazing enough. But doing it with a broken back buys me a little more street cred.”
Some street cred. Melissa was scheduled to undergo surgery this week to replace a disc with a plastic implant and fuse a vertebra in her lower spine. “One of the things that is great is that I’ve lost about a half inch in my height and I will get that back,” she says. “That’s really cool.”
The docs say she should be completely recovered by the end of Septmenber when she plans to shoot a film. “I won’t be jumping around doing a musical for a while,” Melissa said. “The recovery is intense, but my husband [Bruce Boxleitner], my kids and my friends, the casserole brigade, they’re ready.”
Meanwhile, Melissa, who wrote about her battles with alcoholism and drug abuse in her 2009 autobiography, is sticking to her guns about pain killers.
“I’m really careful about this stuff,” she said. “I don’t think you’ll be seeing me getting arrested for driving under the influence of Percocet anytime soon.”