DANCING On Ice star Roxy Shahidi has revealed she suffered an agonising injury during training, which left her “unable to breathe”.
Roxy, 40, claimed she had “never been in so much pain” while speaking with The Sun before Sunday’s series premiere.
The Emmerdale star, who has been practicing for months with her skating partner Sylvain Longchambon, explained how she dislocated her rib at the rink.
She said, “I dislocated my rib and I felt very sorry for myself. I didn’t even know that was a thing. It was hard to breathe. If I coughed or sneezed it was agony. Absolute spasms.
“But over the course of about three weeks, it got better and over Christmas, it’s really rested. And all I’ve got left is like a lump where it’s kind of come out, which is scar tissue, so I’ve just got to be careful with it and if I feel it again, get strapped up.
“That’s been the main physical issue that I’ve had. They think it’s been apparently it’s quite a common injury with the lifts, but it didn’t happen doing a lift.
“The muscles kind of tighten up and it slowly ekes out after, like repeated compression.”
Recounting a horrifying after-effect from her wound, Roxy added, “I was sat in the car, dropping my daughter off at school.
“I sneezed and like, all of my body went into spasm, I’ve never felt pain like it. And I literally, like, I couldn’t breathe for if it felt like 10 minutes, I could barely open the car door, it took me about 10 minutes to get out of the car.
“I had no idea what had happened and as soon as I spoke to Sharon the physio, she was like, ‘Yeah, that’s quite a common injury for skaters. It comes from the kind of the compression on the ribs and, you know, the compression of the rib cage.’
“So she’s given me exercises to work on strengthening and stretching exercises and that I’ve been doing every day and it certainly feels a lot better, but once that’s happened there is always that anxiety, that it’s going to happen again, you know, because the lifts are just going to get bigger and bigger as you go on.”
Roxy’s been left with a “weird” lump on her rig cage which she’s not too happy about, but has admitted it won’t be visible when she makes her show debut over the weekend.
It’s been a long time coming for Roxy, who revealed earlier this week she finally signed up for the show seven years after she was first asked to appear.
She said: “I wanted to do the show nearly seven years ago, I thought it’d be fabulous, lots of sequins and big hair, but then I realised I was 12 weeks pregnant.
“I didn’t know when I originally had the meeting, so I then had to say ‘Oh look, I’m pregnant, I don’t think it’s going to be a good idea for me’.
“Then my daughter was small, and it’s a huge commitment, it’s very demanding – but I just knew for a long time it wasn’t really something that would be right for me to do.
“And then this year I got the call, ‘Do you want to poop in?’ and I was like, ‘Oh, do I?’ I’m a little bit older now and a bit more cautious.
“But after ten minutes on the ice, all my anxieties melted away.”
Roxy continues: “My friends are all really excited and very generously keep saying, which is quite pressurising, ‘Oh my God, you’re going to be amazing. You’re going to be amazing. It’s the yoga.
“My friends have been really excited and really, really big support from everyone at Emmerdale which I’m really grateful for.
“But again there’s pressure because everyone who’s done it from Emmerdale has won and everyone keeps reminding me of that!”
