NEED TO KNOW
When Elaine Hendrix sets her mind to something, nothing can stop her.
Three days after The Parent Trap alum, 54, was rushed to the hospital for a rib injury while rehearsing for that night’s episode of Dancing with the Stars, she tells PEOPLE she’s doing whatever it takes to stay in the competition.
“I’m just hoping again to go all the way, because I want to keep showing what I can do,” Hendrix explains. “I’m taking care of the injuries, but I’ve made it really clear to [partner] Alan [Bersten] that unless it’s just something I absolutely can’t do, we’re not holding back. We’ll get the pain managed, and I just want to keep going for it.”
abc
Thinking back to the morning of the incident, Hendrix says that while she knew she had bruised her ribs a week prior to her hospitalization, everything was going fine until she began experiencing a pain that was “nothing like” anything she felt before.
“That day literally took my breath away,” she recalls. “In that moment, I thought something very, very serious had happened, and I could barely breathe. I almost passed out. I couldn’t move without just a searing pain going through me. It was so sweet because everyone — apparently, I was really out of it — really rallied around me.”
“All I could think of was like, ‘Okay, what do we do to get me up and going? I got to dance tonight,’ ” she continues. “And they’re like, ‘Oh no, honey, you got to go to the hospital.’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no,’ and I’m begging them not to take me to the hospital, but it’s good they did.”
Her “bestie” Lisa Ann Walter immediately drove to meet her at the hospital, as did Bersten, who Hendrix says was “beside himself” with worries about her well-being. He later returned to the studios for the live show, where a video of their only full rehearsal in the ballroom was played, garnering an “outpouring of love” from the cast, judges and fans.
“That was a real boost for me and just made me feel so good,” Hendrix shares.
She also appreciated that the audience recognized her commitment to the competition, saying that the fans’ recognition of her hard work, along with her costumes, hair, and makeup, made her feel “the best of all.”
“That made me feel the best of all because I was like, ‘Oh, then I’ve really been doing my job. I’ve really been doing what I wanted to do,’ which was perform everything to the fullest,” she says. “So that has translated, and that to me was probably the biggest gift I could have gotten from this situation.”
Disney/Eric McCandless
Tearing up, Hendrix then admits that she and Walter were anxious all night as they waited from her hospital bed to see if she and Bersten would be safe to continue into the next week.
“I get really emotional because I was really scared that I was going to be going home and that was not the note that I wanted to end on,” she says. “When I was notified that we made it through, we both just started sobbing and laughing and crying and it was a real moment. I’m grateful.”
Hendrix has since been cleared by doctors, and while she reveals they speculate she has a strain or muscle tear, she knows “nothing is fractured, nothing’s broken, nothing is punctured.”
After two days off, she returned to rehearsals on Friday, Oct. 31, and says she is ecstatic to be back in the ballroom come Tuesday.
“I’m like, ‘Okay, I can deal with this,’” she notes. “I know now what the most excruciating level is and we’ve just got to do everything possible for me not to get to that level again. And so I started the next day — I’ve gone in, I’ve been doing all the tests and I’m doing physical therapy and I’m on a very involved protocol and I am 1000% determined. I was determined before. Now it’s just through the roof.”
“One way or another, I just knew that I was going to fight through it,” she adds.
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Season 34 of Dancing with the Stars airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET and PT on ABC. Episodes are available for streaming the next day on Disney+ and Hulu.
