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MEGAN KURASHIGE |
A bit of bad news from me… I tore the ACL in my right knee, so I won’t be dancing for some time. It’s not a catastrophic injury, but I do need to get surgery to reconstruct the ligament and the recovery time after that is something around eight months.
I’m not sure why it happened. It was just a little thing. A tiny, pedestrian hop in rehearsal and then there was this loud POP! and that was it. Really painful. It’s always those little things for me. I’ve only ever had minor injuries (sprained ankles… that’s about it, really) before, but they always happen when I’m doing the smallest, simplest things. Maybe I’m tired or distracted or not quite as warmed up as I should be. There’s just something humbling about it. I mean, if I was doing some crazy fall to the ground or a huge grand allegro it might feel, if not justifiable, then at least excusable. But a hop!
I’m doing some P.T. to regain full mobility of the joint before I go in for surgery. It’s a pretty intense workout for my one leg… Maybe after the whole process I’ll be lopsided, with the bad leg stronger than my good leg!
At least they give you your MRI with a pretty picture of the Golden Gate to cheer you up, right?
My doctor told me that I could keep doing barre until surgery, if I was careful. So yesterday I was taking barre, not turning out very much and moving slowly and basically focusing entirely on keeping my knee stable. We were doing something on one leg and between one moment and another my knee collapsed out from under me. I fell flat on the floor. It was the strangest feeling; my leg was under my control and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. It felt like my leg was made up of two blocks balanced happily on top of one another and then something came along and jerked the bottom one away. Bizarre. Also mortifying. If it hadn’t been painful it would’ve been comical. All the little marionettes marching along and then one slips on a banana peel.
I’m trying to find things to keep me occupied during my more sedentary months. I’ve signed up for National Novel Writing Month (50,000 words in the month of November!), I’ve been seeing movies (am utterly obsessed with the soundtrack from The Darjeeling Limited), I finally read Atonement (wonderful), and just today I received my season three DVD set of Doctor Who (who knew pinstripes could be so exciting?). I even started a blog to whinge about my non-dancing time. There are all these things that I can do with the my suddenly empty schedule, but it’s just not the same, you know?
