Christie Brinkley says docs want her to have shoulder replacement surgery

Christie Brinkley says that after recently undergoing a long-overdue hip replacement, she has been advised she also needs surgery to replace a shoulder.

The Bridgehampton supermodel, 67, told the London newspaper The Times on Wednesday that one shoulder had sustained lasting damage when she broke her right arm in a fall during rehearsals for "Dancing with the Stars" in 2019. Doctors at some point advised her, she said, that the shoulder needed to be replaced. Brinkley has procrastinated, after having already endured discomfort and awkwardness with her arm in a cast.

She described one vivid incident during a business event. Wearing a tight dress with Spanx shapewear underneath, she was unable to extricate herself from her clothing in order to use the restroom. Her assistant had to help, Brinkley recalled. "I said, 'Kate! I think I need an extraction!' We had to use cuticle scissors to cut me out of my underwear."

In September 2019, partnered with ballroom pro Val Chmerkovskiy, Brinkley was competing on season 28 of ABC's "Dancing with the Stars." She tripped and fell in a rehearsal studio while the duo was working on a routine, and the network said in a statement that Brinkley had "suffered injuries which required surgery to her wrist and arm." Her daughter, model and college student Sailor Brinkley-Cook, took her place.

As well, Brinkley and others suffered injuries in an April 1994 helicopter crash while on a ski vacation in the mountains near Telluride, Colorado. She escaped not badly hurt and was discharged from the hospital the following day. But one hip got twisted, and the then-40-year-old model found herself facing repercussions as she got older.

"[I]f I went jogging, I'd have to stop along the way and lift my knee up and kind of pop it [her hip joint] back in, then jog on," she told The Times. "Then one day I couldn't pop it back in, it would snag, and the doctor said, 'You need a double hip replacement.' "

She announced this January, that she had undergone what she described as a single hip replacement. "New Year, New Hip! Yes that's a band aid on my hip," Brinkley wrote on Instagram, explaining she had "injured my hip in a back country skiing helicopter crash on a mountaintop in Telluride many years ago. 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 last year while quarantining during the coronavirus pandemic, "I decided to finally take time for myself and do something about the pain that had progressively influenced my decisions. I wanted to be ready to be able to say yes to opportunity. I had my surgery at Thanksgiving and I was dancing in my kitchen by New Years Eve…."