The Surgery

Hi again!

One of the main reasons I decided that I was going to create a dance solo for my WISE project is because I thought I wasn't going to be able to dance again. I feel at a competition last July. It was our national competition and probably the worse possible time for me to get injured because summer rehearsals are when we really buckle down and learn so much. I was devastated when I feel and new that dancing would be put on hold for a while, but I refused to let myself believe that it might be almost a year before I was back on the stage again.
I had been dealing with an ankle injury for a year and a half by the time that competition came around. I was taping my ankle every day for rehearsals and had tried every ankle brace on the market. Nothing took the pain away, but it made the pain at least tolerable. When I did gymnastics, we always worked through the pain. When you are beating your body up the way we were, it was only natural that things were going to start hurting. I tired a blind eye to the pain and just thought it was something that I could work through. I should have listened to the injury though. I should have stopped dancing long before I did (more like was forced to).
On August 28,2012, I had my surgery. The formal title: Ostochondral Allograft with Ligament Reconstruction. Basically, I needed a torn ligament repaired on the outside of my right ankle and on the inside of that foot, I needed a piece of cadaver bone (held in place with two metal screws) to fill in the quarter size hole I had worn into the bone.
This is a website gives a pretty good over view of what that surgery entailed. I did not read this website until months after surgery and I had no idea the severity of the surgery and the complexity until I read it... I still can't believe they actually did that to me!

Allograft Surgery!