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, Erbert underwent emergency brain surgery after collapsing backstage while touring with Hough. 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,” Hough 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.”
Hough and Erbert’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 Hough stepped back, leaving Erbert 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 Hough looked back on the nightmare that unfolded last December.
Xochitl Gomez had just taken home the mirrorball trophy, and newlyweds Hough and Erbert were midway through their Symphony of Dance tour when their lives “came to a screeching halt in the most devastating way,” he said.
“I was on stage, and she’s supposed to come out,” he recalled, when a stage manager told him Erbert 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,” Hough 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 — Erbert was “unrecognizable,” missing 40% of her skull, Hough continued. He added that he was relieved when his wife remembered they had been dancing before the incident.
Later that month, Erbert 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.”
Ebert 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, Erbert 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,” Erbert 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,” Hough 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 Bergh and Stephan Bielecki.
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