Christie Brinkley still troubled by 'DWTS' injury

The rehearsal mishap that severely injured Bridgehampton supermodel Christie Brinkley and cut short her "Dancing with the Stars" stint in 2019 still plagues her, she says, adding that more surgery has been recommended for her shoulder damage.

"When I broke my arm I also did something to my shoulder which has not recovered," Brinkley, 68, told Hello! magazine. "I have done a round of MRIs and they told me I need a complete shoulder replacement."

Brinkley, while rehearsing with ballroom professional Val Chmerkovskiy for season 28 of ABC's "Dancing with the Stars," tripped and fell in a dance studio while the duo was working on a routine, and suffered what the network said were "injuries which required surgery to her wrist and arm." Her daughter, model and college student Sailor Brinkley-Cook, took her place. 

"So here's the news. I just broke my arm into a 1000 pieces requiring surgery with a metal plate and screws to hold my arm together," Brinkley explained in a Sept. 16, 2019, Instagram post.

That January she gave a progress report, saying on a People magazine web series that she was about to have an injection of platelet-rich plasma, a medical treatment thought to promote healing of tendons and ligaments: "I'm going to get PRP and some sort of manipulation to my shoulder, my wrist and my thumb because it's still healing but not fast enough. I mean, its been four months."

Yet while doctors more recently urged additional surgery, Brinkley told Hello! she does not "have time" for an operation and recovery, and instead is "looking at stem-cell treatments," adding, "We'll see how that goes."

Brinkley's other recent health issues include what she described in January 2021 as a single hip replacement, explaining on Instagram that she had "injured my hip in a back country skiing helicopter crash on a mountaintop in Telluride many years ago," referring to a well-known 1994 accident in Colorado. "The pain in my hip got a little bit worse each year. 12 years ago I was told it needed to be replaced but the surgery was daunting!" But with down time at the height of the pandemic, "I had my surgery at Thanksgiving and I was dancing in my kitchen by New Years Eve … ."

Then, this December, she revealed on Instagram she had "just discovered that I have something called Acute Angle Closure. I only found out because I included an eye exam as part of my yearly physical check up and my brilliant ophthalmologist spotted this problem." Characterized by a bulging iris that dams up normally circulating eye fluid, increasing eye pressure, it is considered an ocular emergency that could eventually result in blindness.