About my surgery - L5-S1 fusion as a dancer

I'm a 2nd year Musical Theatre student and on the 31st January 2020 I had to have an L5-S1 spinal fusion. In this post, I'm going to talk about why I had my surgery, and then in future posts I will be talking about how it's impacted my training as well as other aspects of my life!

The reason I'm choosing to write about this is because when I found out that I was going to need the surgery, I was incredibly nervous about what would happen to me as a dancer and performer. Dance has always been the side of Musical Theatre that I've found more challenging (even though I still love it!) and then adding surgery recovery on top of that was really worrying. I went online and researched to see if there was any information regarding dancers that had had the same surgery that I was about to have, but I could only find one website written by a young ballet dancer, and that was all. It was really useful being able to read her point of view, and it gave me comfort knowing that it was possible to still dance after the surgery. However, as a Musical Theatre student we also have to study many other styles of dance, which is why I've decided to start this blog in order to have my own experience out there incase someone else is going through the same thing that I've been through.

So how did this all start? Well, for a long time I've really struggled with back pain, including sciatic pain in my left leg. As a dancer, you learn to push through pain sometimes, which might sound absurd but it's just how it is, and I was definitely pushing through the pain for a while because I didn't want to get behind. However, I also know my body, and I knew that whatever was happening to me definitely wasn't normal. The pain was getting worse and worse, and it was often keeping me up at night as well. Eventually, I decided to get it looked at. So I had my first trip to my GP back in October 2019, and after explaining my symptoms he suggested that it sounded like arthritis, and sent me for an X-Ray and blood tests. He also prescribed me Naproxen tablets to take and asked me to return in two weeks.

After having the X-Ray and blood tests, I went back to the doctors where they said that they couldn't find anything out of place, and referred me to a specialist. It was at this point that I decided to go private because I just wanted it out of the way so that I could get on with my second year of training. I am very lucky because my dad has health insurance through his job and so we weren't paying for it out of our own pockets. We arranged an initial appointment with my new doctor who examined me but seemed confused about the symptoms I was showing. He sent me for an MRI but didn't seem overly concerned at the time.

I had the MRI, and went back for my follow up appointment on the 12th December 2019. This is when my doctor explained that a tumour had been found in my lower spine. Sitting there whilst he explained what this all meant was probably the scariest and most confusing ten minutes I've ever gone through in my whole life. The tumour found was called an osteoblastoma, which is a very rare bone tumour. He referred me to a tumour specialist at another hospital, and a week later I was meeting him for the first time, and I also had a CT scan to confirm the diagnosis and then went back two weeks later to discuss the plan of action.

He explained that surgery would be necessary to remove the tumour, and he recommended that it needed to be done quite quickly. I made arrangements with my college and booked the surgery for the 31st January 2020. As I've already mentioned, removing the tumour meant having an L5-S1 spinal fusion, and I was allowed four weeks off of my training to recover. The surgery did go very well, but I'm going to talk about the aftermath of my surgery and how I went back to training in a different post as this one is getting a bit long!

So this is just a brief overview of why I had my surgery. In my next post I'll talk about how I coped post surgery and how long it's taken me to begin to dance and exercise again. I hope someone reading this has found it interesting and maybe useful, and I really hope if anyone else is experiencing anything like this that it will be helpful to them. Having any kind of surgery as a dancer or performer is a terrifying thing, as there are so many unknowns about how it will affect our bodies, but I am honestly amazed at how well my body has recovered so far. I definitely still have a long way to go, but in the days after my surgery I really didn't think that I would ever feel normal again! However I am now back to training (or kind of training over Zoom due to the pandemic!!!) and I could not be more grateful that my diagnosis and surgery didn't stop me from doing something that I love.

Thank you for reading, and keep an eye out for my next post! :)