While promoting her new action-comedy 'Killers,' co-starring Ashton Kutcher and Tom Selleck and in theaters June 4, Katherine Heigl opened up to "The Insider"'s Chris Jacobs about the harrowing experience of being continents apart from her daughter while baby Naleigh recovered from heart surgery.
Naleigh, who Katherine and hubby Josh Kelley welcomed from Korea last September, underwent the surgery in her native country before the couple began the process of adopting her. Once she'd been assigned to them, however, waiting to bring Naleigh home was the hardest part, Katherine said.
"I was dying because I just wanted to know. I wanted to know: How is she being cared for? And how is this going?" the former "Grey's Anatomy" star told Chris.
"If you're really lucky they'll send a picture every once in a while… And you're going, 'I can't tell if she's happy or well or cared for,' but she really, really was. She was in a wonderful foster family. Her foster mother sat with her every night in the hospital all night during that surgery," Katherine said with an emotional exhale.
She added that meeting her baby daughter for the first time was a profoundly moving experience.
"It was surreal. I just sort of grabbed her out of the social worker's arms… and held her against me, and was just like, 'Okay, now what?'" she laughed.
"For days and days we just held her all the time… and she would lay on us like a little pea pod and watch. Just watch everything, and I'm sure she was terrified," Katherine recalled. "At that point, all we wanted to do was tell her she's loved: 'You're safe and you're loved.'… To see her now -- boy, does she know she's safe and loved!"
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