Dancing's Derek Hough: We're Playing It By Ear

Hey guys,
Thanks for your messages! Sorry I was MIA last week. Things got hectic, but I'm back now!
Amy is feeling better. It's a day-to-day thing. She was overworking a certain muscle group in her back and it just came to a head on Monday. After we got the judges' comments, she turned to go up to the skybox and she felt something pop. Her muscles had spasmed and she dislocated her rib, and her back started spasming out of control. She was in a lot of pain. The doctors got the rib back in place, but because of the spasms, her muscles are inflamed, so it's still hurts. It takes a couple days for it come down. She's been feeling much better the past few days, but she's got to be really careful with it.
Amy's been cleared to continue, but she hasn't been dancing yet because of the inflammation. It's not like, "You can dance in two days." It's whenever she feels better and feels like she's ready to. I've been dancing with someone else right now in rehearsals and Amy is in all the rehearsals watching.
We have the Argentine tango this week. I'm not really downgrading choreography to favor her back because there's not much you can tweak in the Argentine tango to do that unless you do something really basic and not that interesting. I'm going ahead and choreographing something that I would normally do and hopefully she can do it. I always glance over to see what kind of face Amy is making when we're rehearsing to see if she thinks she can do the move or not. I have one eye on her and one eye on what I'm doing. So far there haven't been too many bad faces!
We also have this dance duel thing. It's not quite the Side-By-Side Challenge from a couple seasons ago. I have no idea what this is! Two couples dance together and two celebrities dance together and then we dance together as a group again at the end. I'm not really sure what's happening, but we'll figure it out! We're playing it by ear this week.
Obviously Amy's health comes first, but we were all bummed, including Amy, that we couldn't do our team dance. It was a lot of fun putting it together and everyone was pumped up for it. I felt really bad for the rest of the team that we couldn't do it, especially for the celebrities. There's a different vibe and energy to the team dances and I felt bad that they might miss out on it. Right before we went on, I said, "Guys, let's just dance it live right now while they're watching the dress rehearsal tape. Let's dance for the audience here." Everyone was into it, so we did it and went full-out. The audience was having a blast. I danced with an imaginary partner, who was great! It turned out to be a really awesome moment. I hope ABC will upload it so you all can see it.
See you Monday!
Derek