Abby Lee Miller, 53, has a fresh new look thanks to a facelift! After her grueling battle with cancer, the Dance Moms star went under the knife, and documented the entire experience for talk show The Doctors. In the opening clips filmed at Dr. Simoni’s office in Beverly Hills, a nervous Abby admitted she was “scared” to undergo the elective procedure. “I just don’t like needles,” she continued, as the plastic surgeon team began to mark her face and neck with a pen.
“The first part is to do liposuction of the neck, and you can see that the fat is little by little coming through that little tube,” the doctor explained to Abby. “Now we’re starting with the face and we’re making tiny incisions around the ears to get access to the facial fat and muscles,” he continued. Abby kept her sense of humor, quipping that Dr. Simono would need “gallons” of fat as he went ahead with the procedure. In the before and after photos, Abby’s face is noticeably firmer with a more defined jaw line and cheekbones.
The procedure follows Abby’s intense battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in April 2018, which required her to undergo surgery, spinal taps and 10 rounds of chemotherapy. She announced she was “cancer free” in May 2019, and opened up about her experience. “I would have been dead [if it wasn’t caught],” Abby admitted in an interview on Good Morning America later that month. “I was paralyzed from the neck down — no movement…because this cancer — this lymphoma — was choking my spinal cord.”
The treatments temporarily paralyzed Abby, restricting her to a wheel chair after recovering. “I was paralyzed from my neck down. I was in the fetal position, just talking, that was it, that was all I could do, and [her doctor] did eight hours of emergency surgery,” Abby also said. She’s been slowly focused on getting her mobility back, and took her first steps in front of The Doctors‘ live studio audience in Sept. 2019. “This is so scary, you have no idea,” the Pittsburgh native announced, as she used a walker then balanced completely on her own. Abby has come a long way in the months since, actively chronicling her progress on YouTube. In a December video, she announced she walked “86 steps” as she used a walker to move around.
