I’ve never been good about going to doctors. A lot of that has to do with growing up in the USA. The health care system in the USA is expensive. It’s gonna cost you a gazillion dollars just to walk in the doors of an emergency room. A good portion of dancers fall into the category of the “working poor” which means that insurance rates are beyond our means and we make too much to qualify for social assistance. Even if you managed to get medical coverage from the company (or union) you were working with, there were always additional charges for every visit to the doctor. It really wasn’t worth it to me to pay several hundred dollars to a doctor to – tell me something that I already knew –“You have a sprained ankle” – and do something I wasn’t going to do – “You need to take six weeks off”. I learned to do without. The only reason I would venture into the doctor’s office was to get a prescription drug or if I thought something truly was serious. The process of deciding whether an injury was serious enough to go see a doctor also took time – usually a couple of days. First I’d tell myself I wasn’t hurt. Then I’d show a friend and ask their opinion. Then I figured if I just wait a little bit longer – it would heal itself. When I ran out of options – I would reluctantly drag myself to the doctor’s office. Once I moved to Canada – you would have thought that I’d be better about getting to the doctor with their socialized medical system. What can I say? Old habits die hard.
Doctors are like all people – some are great – some are mediocre – and some are just plain idiots. It’s always best to go to a doctor with your eyes open. I got dropped from an overhead lift when I was a teenager and subsequently chipped a bone in my ankle. The chip eventually lodged itself in one of my tendons where it proceeded to slowly slice away at the fibers. It was a bit painful. At the time of the injury, the assistant director of the company drove me to the local hospital (we were on tour) where they pronounced me healthy. I went back to work immediately. Six months later (the chip was now thoroughly embedded in the tendon) and the pain level increased. I was sent to the company doctor (within the mediocre to idiot category) who decided that my problem was not my ankle but my bunions. He had absolutely no interest in what I had to say (like the pain was in my ankle) and he pushed my mother and director towards surgery to remove the offending bone masses. Somehow I convinced my mother to hold off on the surgery and we came up with another solution that was acceptable to the director. I would take some time off AND if after a few weeks of rest the pain was still there, I would agree to the surgery. The weeks passed, the pain was still there and I lied. I told everyone that my foot was completely healed.
Within a few months, I couldn’t fake it any longer. I could barely walk, much less dance. This time my mother asked our family doctor to recommend an orthopedic surgeon. On my first visit, I knew that I had found the right man. When I removed my shoes and socks, his eyes widened and he said, “My God, you’ve got really ugly feet. What did you do to them?” I patiently explained that all ballet dancers had ugly feet due to pointe work. I even offered to bring in a couple of my colleagues to back me up. “Just a minute,” he said as he stepped out of the examining room. He returned a few minutes later with another doctor. “Look at these ugly feet! I’ll bet you ten dollars that you can’t guess what she does for a living.” The other doctor stared at my feet for a minute and then shook his head. “She dances,” my doctor proclaimed proudly, “All dancers have ugly feet.” I cracked up. I knew this man was going to be fun to work with. The “What does she do for a living” bet continued for a couple of weeks with my doctor raking in the money until he ran across one particular intern. “She’s a dancer,” said the intern, “My wife is a dancer and you know – all dancers have ugly feet.” My doctor did bring up the bunion issue. “They’re awfully large. You really should have them removed sometime.” I gritted my teeth, expecting a fight. “Then again,” he continued, “Do they bother you?” “No,” I said. “Well then,” he said, “No need to mess with something before it’s ready, right?” I was right – he was a great doctor.
Everyone agreed that until the surgery scheduled, I could continue dancing. The only issue was pain management and for that I received weekly cortisone injections. Cortisone is not as widely used now as it was then. At the time, cortisone was the miracle drug of professional athletes which was injected directly into the injured area. The shot itself was extremely painful – with a burning sensation. It’s like shoving a needle into a fresh blister and grinding it around the blister for a minute or so. Pain on top of pain. The upside was that after a couple of hours – you had no pain or sensation for that matter in the injured area. I’ve never been fond of needles but I had always managed to stifle my aversion. After a couple of those cortisone injection sessions, my aversion blossomed to pure panic. I don’t know about you – but I have real problems distinguishing nuances when I’m panicking. The doctor would poke around my ankle asking, “Does this hurt? Or does this hurt more?” Kind of like those eye tests you take when they ask you which letter E is clearer. How many times have you made the ophthalmologist go back and forth between the same two E’s? In my world, the degrees of pain go like this – it hurts – it doesn’t hurt. The object of the ankle poking was to find the heart of the injury and inject the cortisone directly into that spot. After one particularly painful injection session, my doctor said, “You know, I could swear that wasn’t the same place that I injected you in last week.” I stared at him in horror. We had to do it all over again. After that, the doctor came up with a new solution. He marked the injection spot with a bit of ink and asked me not to wash the spot too much before the next week’s appointment. OK – fallible but still a guy that finds solutions – still a great doctor.
The night before the operation, the doctor visited me with a few last minute instructions, “Don’t let the nurse give you any sedatives until I see you. I have to mark the spot on your ankle where I need to go in and I need you awake to tell me where the pain is – OK?” I agreed. The nurse woke me up at five o’clock in the morning and told me, “Take this pill and I’ll be back in a few minutes to get you.” “I can’t,” I mumbled, “Doc said not to.” She argued with me for a few minutes but I continued to refuse the pill. “I’ll just go see about this,” she said leaving the room. She returned. “Your doctor said to take the medication,” she said offering me the pill. “Are you sure?” She nodded. I obediently swallowed the pill and went back to sleep. I awoke to find myself rolling down a hallway on a table and there was my doctor leaning over me and smiling. “Why were you giving the nurse such a hard time this morning,” he asked. My brain was already foggy from the drugs, so I just stared at him. “Why wouldn’t you take the sedative?” he asked again. I blinked. “You told me not to.” He started swearing and yelling, “That’s right! I forgot! Quick, we’ve got to get her into the operating room!” They started running the gurney down the hall. In my blitzed-out condition, I was kind of enjoying myself. It felt like an amusement park ride. “Hurry,” my doctor was yelling, “Before she passes out.” My table came to a jerky stop in the middle of a room and from that point things started moving really fast. The doctor and a couple of other people were jabbing my ankle, constantly asking, “Does this hurt?” while an old guy with a large nose lowered his face to mine and said, “Hi there, I’m your anesthesiologist.” He grabbed one arm while a nurse grabbed the other. She was taking my blood pressure while he was droning on about how I was going to go painlessly to sleep. My last thought before oblivion set in was, “How anyone could go to sleep with all this racket going on is beyond me…..”
While in the hospital recuperating, I was visited by one of my dance teachers. He was a strange little man who rarely talked to anyone outside of the classroom. He took a few steps into the room, looked at me and said, “Rosella Hightower couldn’t balance until the bones in her foot were broken,” and left. Up until that point, I had been feeling pretty sorry for myself but then I figured that if it had worked for Rosella Hightower (who had been a major prima ballerina) – it was good enough for me.
Why don’t they ever tell you how to use crutches before they send you home? Who knew that you always go down a staircase moving the crutches down first? For those of you who aren’t as stupid as I was, let me tell what happens when you do it the wrong way. As you start to step down, the crutches act like a pole vault – you dangle about six inches in the air – the crutches start to follow your weight AND you are propelled into the air. Or in my case, propelled into a wall and doing my best Spiderman imitation before falling to the floor.