Hayley Erbert Marks Return to ‘DWTS’ Alongside Husband Derek Hough a Year After Undergoing Emergency Surgery

Hayley Erbert is back in the ballroom nearly a year after she was rushed to the hospital with a cranial hematoma. The dancer, 30, gave an emotional performance alongside her husband, judge Derek Hough, during the Tuesday, Oct. 15 episode of Dancing With the Stars.

Dancing to “Beautiful Things” by Benson Boone on Season 33’s Dedication Night, the couple, who married in August 2023, embraced as the lyrics declared, “Oh I hope I don’t lose you,” and ended their routine with a kiss.

Erbert’s return to the stage comes nearly a year after undergoing an emergency craniectomy in December 2023. In a pre-taped segment of Tuesday’s episode, Hough opened up about his wife’s medical emergency, which occurred during the couple’s Symphony of Dance tour stop in Washington D.C.

“I was onstage and she was supposed to come out,” Hough, 39, recalled. “The stage manager just walked out and said, ‘Hey, she’s not coming onstage.’ She was on the side of the stage having full seizures and essentially dying. It’s really hard to put into words, other than just pure fear.”

The So You Think You Can Dance alum was rushed to the hospital, where Hough was given terrible news about her prognosis. “The doctor came to me and said, ‘She has a severe brain bleed, so we have to operate right now.’ He said that she might not make it, and that even if she does make it, she won’t be the same person,” the DWTS judge tearfully remembered.

When Hough saw his wife the following morning, she had lost 40% of her skull but had the memory of dancing before her emergency. “I can’t even tell you, just knowing that she was there, she was in there, the relief I felt,” Hough said while crying. “She was Hayley. She was my wife. And then the journey began.”

Doctors warned Erbert she might never walk again, but she said in Tuesday’s episode that she was “determined” to dance again. “To say it was easy to get there would be a complete lie,” she said, pointing at her husband as her “rock throughout it all.”

Miraculously, Erbert returned to the dance studio in March and was cleared to perform on the Symphony of Dance tour in April. “What a blessing (and surprise) it is to be able to be back on stage dancing with my love after such a crazy past four months,” she wrote on Instagram at the time. “My healing journey has been nothing short of extraordinary and being able to dance again is igniting my soul in all the ways; speeding up my recovery even more.”