This week, Derek Hough took the Dancing with the Stars stage with his wife Hayley Erbert — something he thought he’d never do again.
Last year, Hayley underwent emergency brain surgery after collapsing backstage while touring with Derek. That night at the hospital, doctors told the six-time DWTS champion that his wife, as he knew her, was gone.
“It was not even a thought like, ‘Oh, we’re going to dance again,’ honestly,” Derek said in an interview published Wednesday with People magazine. “And then to be here, it’s unbelievable. It’s just hard to put it into words.”
Derek and Hayley’s routine to Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things (Acoustic)” featured moments of technical precision as well as emotional catharsis. At its close, the couple shared a kiss before Derek stepped back, leaving Hayley to bask in the spotlight — and roaring applause. Clutching her heart, she took a bow.
Before the performance Tuesday night, the show aired a segment during which Derek looked back on the nightmare that unfolded last December.
Xochitl Gomez had just taken home the mirrorball trophy, and newlyweds Derek and Hayley were midway through their Symphony of Dance tour when their lives “came to a screeching halt in the most devastating way,” he said.
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Hayley was having seizures.
“I was on stage, and she’s supposed to come out,” he recalled, when a stage manager told him Hayley was “having full seizures and essentially dying.” They rushed the dancer — still in costume — to the hospital, where they were told she had suffered a severe brain bleed and immediately required an operation.
“[The doctor] said that she might not make it and that even if she does make it, she won’t be the same person,” Derek said. “I just remember laying on the hospital floor just begging. I was like, ‘Please don’t go.'”
The morning after her emergency craniectomy — a type of brain surgery where a surgeon will remove a piece of the skull to relieve pressure — Hayley was “unrecognizable,” missing 40% of her skull, Derek continued. He added that he was relieved when his wife remembered they had been dancing before the incident.
Later that month, Hayley underwent a cranioplasty, which according to the National Library of Medicine, “is the surgical intervention to repair cranial defects in both cosmetic and functional ways” and is performed “mostly after traumatic injuries.”
The footage made Hayley emotional.
Hayley said during the segment that she was told she might not walk again. But “stubborn” as ever, she was back in the dance studio by March and given medical clearance to return to the tour in April.
Watching the segment Tuesday night, Hayley told People she was “flooded with emotions.”
“When they played the package, that’s when I started losing it because I actually haven’t seen a lot of the footage in quite some time,” she told People, adding that she’s kept her focus on recovering. “And so to go back to that, I was just flooded with emotions, but it was extremely special to be out here.”
The dancer, who just celebrated her 30th birthday, added that she is learning to listen to her body and gauge when “something’s off.”
“I’m very, very, very mindful, almost maybe overly mindful of things that we do, moves that we do to make sure that she’s protected, she’s safe at all times,” Derek said, adding that their DWTS cameo was “just sort of the beginning of telling the full story.”
That effort will continue, the couple announced Tuesday, with a documentary being directed by Jason Bergh (The Greatest Love Story Never Told) and produced by Jason and Stephan Bielecki.
–Malia Mendez, Los Angeles Times (TNS)
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