Never has anything perplexed me more than what went down with Carrie Underwood. The singer suffered a fall resulting in a terrifying number of stitches, and subsequently retreated from public life to heal. She began slowly teasing her return on social media, and judging by her silence, fans were preparing for surgery to have made the star look a little different. When she debuted her healed face last weekend during the ACM Awards, however, it was immediately clear that the doctors did a bang-up job. She looks exactly the same. So what exactly happened?
"I just fell down," she told Sirius XM. "I was taking the dogs out to go do their thing before bed and I was clumsy and I tripped and I held onto the dog leashes in my left hand and went to catch myself with my right and just missed the step."
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While it sounds like a simple accident, the results were extreme.
"I thought I just busted my lip. Then I walked inside and took the dog leashes off and took my coat off and went to go survey the damage and was like, 'Oh, no,'" Underwood continued. "I'm acting very calm about it now...It wasn't pretty."
However, her silence and hesitation had less to do with her appearance and more about her new music. She knew the focus would be on her health, and she wanted to shift the conversation ahead of her new single, "Cry Pretty."
"I was nervous about music first and foremost," she explained. "And we wanted things to be about the song that night [of the ACM Awards], just kind of tried to avoid doing other things beforehand just because I didn't want to talk about my accident the whole time."
Luckily, she knocked it out of the park. The performance was moving and powerful, sending out a message that was deeply personal yet resonated with the whole audience. Carrie Underwood is back.