The actress, 44, tells PEOPLE she’s committed to staying in the competition despite having “snapped a tendon in my hamstring” during practice
ABC; Disney/Eric McCandless
The Boy Meets World alum, 44, pushed through a hamstring tear, which she sustained during practice with her partner Pasha Pashkov, to earn a 19/30 on her Cha Cha during week 2 of Dancing with the Stars.
After the show, Fishel tells PEOPLE she’s “totally fine” despite her injury and how she treated it — she said in her package she got a deep tissue massage that “broke every blood vessel” in the back of her leg.
“I snapped a tendon in my hamstring,” she explains. “I had a meeting with a surgeon, and I don’t need surgery, so it’s just a matter of rehabbing it and taking care of it.”
Pashkov, 39, is “going to choreograph around that right leg for a week to give me a little bit of a rest, and I’ll be fine,” the actress says.
“I was only going to leave here because of an injury if they brought me out on a stretcher,” Fishel adds.
Her partner was quick to praise Fishel’s tenacity, too, telling PEOPLE of her injury, “Because of the amazing body makeup … and how you danced, no one would ever know, because you literally danced like nothing ever happened.”
“I’m good under pressure,” Fishel admits. “And I’m a performer. I haven’t been in front of the camera performing for a very long time. I didn’t know if I was going to feel rusty or if I was going to know what to do anymore.”
“But literally, the minute the audience loads in and I get that feeling, it’s 1994 again, and there’s an audience of 250 people on the set of Boy Meets World and it’s live show night — I just come alive from the inside,” she says.
Disney/Eric McCandless
The experience has been an emotional one for the actress, who told PEOPLE after last week’s premiere that it was “amazing” to be dancing in the ballroom after her cancer battle.
“Thinking about where I was last year, in the middle of cancer treatment, and here a year later, on a national stage performing a thing I’ve never done before, ballroom dancing, with my friends and family in the audience, it was very emotional,” Fishel said.
