Beautiful people are not spared the indignities of overextended joints, which is how the supermodel Gisele Bündchen found herself staring down the barrel of two shoulder surgeries in 2019 and 2020.
At the time, Ms. Bündchen was living in Boston with the N.F.L. quarterback Tom Brady, then her husband, still recovering from an operation on her back to treat an injury she’d incurred falling off a horse. She’d refused the procedure at first, throwing herself into holistic alternatives like acupuncture. But the M.R.I.s revealed what the glittering fashion shoots and paparazzi photos could not: Nearing 40, she was in tatters.
“I never felt so depressed and vulnerable,” Ms. Bündchen, now 43, recalled. She couldn’t lift her own luggage or pick up her two young children, Benjamin and Vivian. “If I was sitting, I was hurting,” she said.
At present she sat, dressed in faded Levi’s and a white waffle-knit shirt — so informal she might have been mistaken for the prettiest mom at school pickup. But when the sun filtered in and her gaze narrowed, the face that sold millions of Victoria’s Secret bras came into focus.
Ms. Bündchen winced as she recalled her months in and out of the operating room. It has been a taxing few years. She lives in Miami now, having left the frigid Massachusetts winters behind for the warmer climes of Florida with its easier access to her native Brazil. The move was as documented by ESPN as it was by the Instagram gossip account Deuxmoi.
The gist: Mr. Brady had retired and un-retired in rapid succession, trading his beloved game and the New England Patriots for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. (He would last three seasons.) Fan accounts speculated about Ms. Bündchen’s resentment over his sudden switch. Reddit warriors accused her of dampening his triumphant comeback. Within months of the relocation, the two shared almost identical statements announcing their divorce.
