Julie Goodwin tells Woman’s Day she’s “absolutely devastated” after she was told by doctors she may have to sit this season of Dancing With The Stars out after tearing her calf muscle in two places.
“I was in enormous pain when it happened – sweating bullets. It was the kind of pain that you can’t even sort of tell people ‘I’m OK.’ Because I wasn’t OK, I really wasn’t,” says Julie, who injured herself rehearsing for the reality show.
RECIPE FOR DISASTER
“I had to be carried out of the studio, because I couldn’t even put my foot down on the floor. I was rushed straight to the doctor.”
And it wasn’t good news for the celebrity cook.
“The scan showed that it was very, very serious. Two bad tears in my calf muscle. There were tears,” she says.
“When I got that news from the doctor, I thought, well, ‘That’s the end of that, I just felt shattered.’”
Especially as the 53-year-old says she dropped everything for Dancing.
“As soon as I made the commitment, I put everything else aside. I was training five and six and even seven days a week,” says the MasterChef winning cooking queen.
“I ramped up all my exercise. I started training at a whole new gym as well as the gym I already went to. I really was committed to being as fit and strong as I could be because I didn’t want to injure myself.
“I didn’t want to not be able to keep up and I didn’t want to get puffed. I really did everything in my power to get in the kind of physical condition I needed to be in.
“It was months of hard work and then, right at the very last minute, right before I was going to go on and do my first number, this happens.”
After 15 years in TV though, Julie believes in the idea that the show must go on!
NOT GIVING IN
And while it’s now up in the air if she’ll get to make her DWTS dancefloor debut, the determined star is going to try!
“I don’t give up that easy,” she tells Woman’s Day. “I’m stubborn. The doctors can tell me what the doctors want to tell me and I’ll take that under advisement and then see if I can prove them wrong.”
She’s also practical, though. “If I can’t get out there and dance I think I’ll need a while to recover emotionally because it’s just been a beautiful time and a really special experience,” she says. “I would really hate for it to end like this.”
Julie also wants to don the sparkles and dance her heart out for her three-year-old granddaughter Delilah.
“First it was my children, and now my grandchild, everything I do it’s just to show them you give things a go – and don’t be frightened to get outside your comfort zone because that’s where the best parts of life happen.”
