Derek Hough revealed that his cat Otis suffered a Christmas Day health scare that ended up costing $8,000 to fix.
The 39-year-old Dancing With The Stars judge, who used to be one of the competing professional dancers on the show, broke the news on Instagram.
Still dressed in his holiday pajamas, Derek posed holding both Otis and a plastic bag from the veterinary lab Antech Diagonistics.
He added an animation of a curvy arrow pointing at the bag, attached to the number: ‘$8000,’ indicating the cost of the treatment.
‘Look what I got for Christmas,’ he wrote. ‘A plastic bag filled with stuff Otis ate and had to be removed from his stomach costing $8000 ! Yay! Glad he’s ok.’
Fans and friends flooded into his comments, including Dancing With The Stars pro Maksim Chmerkovskiy, who wrote: ‘Noooooo!!!! Glad he’s ok!!’
Derek Hough revealed that his cat Otis suffered a Christmas Day health scare that ended up costing $8,000 to fix
English dancer Shirley Ballas, whose son Mark Ballas used to be a Dancing With The Stars pro, also wrote: ‘Omg seriously. Hope the cat feels better.’
Derek shares at least four other pets with his wife Hayley Erbert, another Dancing With The Stars pro – dogs Romi and Luna, and cats Palo and Lily.
‘It’s getting to be a real problem,’ he joked to People in 2021. ‘I’ll be trying to find a photo, and it’s just cat, cat, dog, dog, more cat, dog.’
The brother of Julianne Hough was also able to enjoy a more lighthearted moment over Christmas with Hayley, as seen on Instagram.
Derek and Hayley acquired a Christmas themed ‘twinsie’ – a set of attached Christmas onesies – and tried them on.
‘We’re literally stuck together now . Poor @hayley.erbert,’ Derek wrote in the caption of a video in which he and Hayley modeled the twinsie, giggling and joking.
At one point, the professional dancers tried to coordinate a bit of choreography to the song We Go Together from Grease, but they kept bursting into laughter.
Their cheerful Christmas comes a year after Hayley had to undergo emergency surgery to remove part of her skull after suffering a cranial hematoma.
The brother of Julianne Hough was also able to enjoy a more lighthearted moment over Christmas with his wife Hayley Erbert, as seen on Instagram
Derek is pictured performing with Hayley at a concert of his Dance For The Holidays tour last week at the Fontainebleau Las Vegas
On an episode of Dancing With The Stars last week, Derek tearfully told the story of the harrowing day when he feared he might lose his wife.
‘I was on stage, and she’s supposed to come out,’ he remembered. ‘The stage manager walked out and just said, “Hey, she’s not coming on stage.” She was on the side of the stage having full seizures and, essentially, dying. It’s really hard to even put into words other than just pure fear.’
‘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.”‘
Derek heartbreakingly revealed: ‘He said that she might not make it and that even if she does make it, she won’t be the same person.’
When Hayley woke up, she had no memory of her seizures, Derek explained, saying: ‘She goes: “What happened? Weren’t we just dancing?”‘
He shared: ‘I can’t even tell you, just knowing that she was there, she was in there, the relief I felt. She was Hayley. She was my wife. And then the journey began.’
The doctor told her she may never walk again, but Hayley, describing herself as ‘stubborn,’ was determined not only to walk but also to dance.
She ‘pushed herself to the limit’ in pursuit of her goal and made her grand return to Dancing With The Stars this year in an emotional performance with her husband.
