Getting Grounded to Take Flight

When I first had an inkling that I was going to need physical therapy for my knees, before I even got the official word from my orthopedist, I started to research PTs because I wanted to make sure I saw one who worked with dancers. There was no way I was going to see a PT who didn’t understand why I had to keep dancing at least a little bit while I recovered from my injuries. Lucky for me, Doctors for Dancers had just launched and a PT local to my area had added herself to the database of dance specialists.

Two+ years later, we’ve gotten my knees back into dancing shape (mostly), but we’re still working together on other issues. Besides just directly working on healing my body, my PT has been helping me better understand my body and increase my body awareness, which has just been a boon to my dance training!

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Understanding Why My Body Hurts

Happy Saturday, dancers! Life has kept me busy over the last few weeks. I was travelling for about a week (airports and airplanes were a lot fuller than my last trip in February!). The day after I returned home, I was sitting in line to get my second dose of the Pfizer Covid vaccine. I’ll be fully charged in another week, yay! Go go gadget Covid shield! For those interested, I had one day of fever and body aches following the shot. Unfortunately, the body aches triggered one of my headaches (it doesn’t take much) and that hung around for several days. It was interesting how the fever and body aches came and went. I described it to a friend like doing a system check – flip the switches on and then flip them off. I was feverish and then I wasn’t. There was no lingering.

Luckily, I was free of all symptoms in time for my first dance lesson in two weeks. I didn’t have the opportunity to solo practice while I was gone (aside from visualizations), so my body was either going to love or hate me for jumping back in. Sometimes I feel like the Tin Man during those first few dance steps as I shake the rust off my joints. Our warmup Waltz felt pretty good though!

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