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Nina Dobrev still has a lot of recovery ahead of her, following the scary dirt-biking accident that sent her to the hospital in May.
“I think I’m doing pretty well,” Dobrev told PEOPLE on Wednesday. “I’m a little ahead of schedule in terms of healing, but it is still a very long process.” She added that doctors “were pretty surprised” at her progress so far.
The Vampire Diaries star fractured her knee, requiring surgery, and needed treatment on her ACL and meniscus after her first outing on a dirt bike, she explained during a June appearance on The Talk.
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“I was in a wheelie, lost control, whiskey throttled, bike flew. Luckily it didn’t fall on me, which is what the doctor said would have been a lot worse,” she said. “But when I landed, I landed on one leg, straight, and my knee just like snapped.”
She said that she initially hadn’t realized that it would take nine months to a year for her to recover. Dobrev, 35, has only been working her way back to health for about three-and-a-half months.
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“So there’s still a ways to go,” she said. “And a lot of times at this point in the healing process, people get re-injured because they feel fine. And so they start doing normal things. So I have to kind of remind myself that I’m still healing and there’s still a little bit of time to go.”
Dobrev was one of the many celebrities seen in the crowd at the 2024 Paris Olympics, which she attended with her boyfriend of four years, Olympic snowboarder and skateboarder Shaun White. And it’s good she did.
“All those streets are closed, so you have to walk from venue to venue and do all these things,” Dobrev told PEOPLE. “And so he prearranged to have a wheelchair there so that I wouldn’t have to walk as much. We had my canes and he was there by my side taking care of me the whole time.”
In addition to her six seasons on The Vampire Diaries, Dobrev is known for her work in projects such as the 2012 film adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower and the Flatliners reboot from 2017.