Hayley Erbert Hough’s return to the Dancing with the Stars ballroom was an emotional one — and something her husband, DWTS judge Derek Hough, didn’t see as a possibility in the midst of her recovery from emergency surgery in December 2023.
Speaking exclusively to PEOPLE following their performance to “Beautiful Things” by Benson Boone on the Tuesday, Oct. 15 live show, Hayley, 30, and Derek, 39, opened up about what their ballroom return meant following Hayley’s sudden hospitalization for a cranial hematoma, which is characterized by blood collecting in the skull, and emergency craniectomy.
“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 because I’ve just been focusing on progressing every single day,” Hayley, 30, tells PEOPLE. “And so to go back to that, I was just flooded with emotions, but it was extremely special to be out here.”
The former member of the DWTS dance troupe adds, “This fall was always the most welcoming energy and it was beautiful to be here, to be able to share it with him. And I’m just grateful to be here.”
In a clip introducing Hayley return to the DWTS ballroom, Derek recalled the moment he learned his wife was “essentially dying” in the middle of their Symphony of Dance tour. “We rush her to the hospital, she’s still in her costume, and the doctor came to me and he said that, ‘She has a severe brain bleed, so we have to operate right now,’ ” Hough said in the clip. “He said that she might not make it and that even if she does make it, she won’t be the same person.”
“I was like in those moments we never even, it was not even a thought like, ‘Oh, we’re going to dance again,’ honestly,” Derek tells PEOPLE. “And then to be here, it’s unbelievable. It’s just hard to put it into words.”
“Tonight was just sort of the beginning of telling the full story,” he continues. “We shared a little bit more video and photos of what had happened to show us something to the extent of the severity of it. But this is the beginning and there’s so much more to tell this story and we’re so excited to share the rest of it.”
The couple went on to speak about the rituals they have started to do before performances since Hayley’s medical scare.
“When we go on tour, all the dancers in crew, we all have these little badges that say if there’s any signs of this, this, this, or that, we need to find medical team or something,” Derek tells PEOPLE. “Just so we’re aware. We’re just very cautious. But 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.”
Hayley adds that she focuses on “listening to my body.”
“I can tell when something’s off and I’ll be like, ‘Ooh, that doesn’t feel quite right. I shouldn’t be doing this move or I shouldn’t be doing this number,’ ” she explains. “And so I feel like I am being smart in that way of just being like, I’m going to listen to myself.”