Recovering from surgery as a dancer - L5 - S1 spinal fusion as a dancer

In my last post, I discussed my worries and concerns as a performer needing surgery to remove a bone tumour in my lower back, and the fact that everything was so unknown about how it would affect my body afterwards. As a Musical Theatre student, I have long days of training five days a week and a big part of this is made up of dance classes and other physical lessons, and so you really need your body to be in a good healthy condition in order to get the best out of your training. This was a huge factor into my anxieties about the surgery, because my surgeon told me that realistically it was going to be around 4-6 months before my body was recovered fully, and hearing that was really really worrying to me. I had a lot to think about... Should I defer the year and start it again in September? Should I push the surgery back until after my assessments were over and then have it? Or even worse, would I have to give up completely? My health was the most important thing to me at the time, but I also was desperate to not have to give up doing something that I love so much. Looking back now, all of these worries feel a million miles away.

In this post today, I'm going to talk about my recovery up until now, and also talk a bit about the days after my surgery as well. 

After thinking about all of my different options, I made the decision to have the surgery at the earliest possible date. Like I mentioned in my last post, I had the operation on the 31st January 2020. One thing that was really important to me in the middle of all of this, was the fact that I absolutely did not want to defer my year. That might have seemed like a strange decision to make, as a lot of people probably would have chosen to defer, but for me this just wasn't the right decision and I was 100% certain of it. I talked to my surgeon to see what the time frame would be before I could go back to college and continue with non physical classes like lectures, acting and singing lessons etc, and he suggested it would be around 6 weeks. So, classic me being determined as ever, I went back to my college and was given permission to have this time off for the surgery. 

I kept going with classes right up to two days before my surgery, as I wanted to miss as little as I possibly could, and luckily my operation was in London so I didn't have to make any long journeys for the op. My parents came up to London to be with me whilst I was in hospital, and at 11am on the 31st I went in for the operation. The surgery ended up taking seven hours, which I think is quite long for a regular spinal fusion (although I am by no means medically qualified to talk about this so I actually have no idea!!) but the issue with my surgery was that they struggled to get the tumour out. However though, the surgery did go very well overall, and my surgeon was happy with how it turned out. 

One thing that I really was not expecting after the surgery was the amount of sickness I experienced. I ended up having to spend five days in hospital because I was so unwell, I struggled to keep food down and my blood pressure often dropped quite low. This was my first ever operation though, so I was told that this was normal, and I was just having a very bad reaction to the anaesthetic and painkillers. My hospital was amazing though and they took really good care of me. The day after my op the physios had me out of bed and walking (sort of), as they said that it was important to get moving straight away, which I understood. Although I did pass out the first time they tried to get me up, and the pain was genuinely the worst thing that I have ever experienced, I took a few small steps later that day which was just insane. Over the next few days the physios kept visiting to have me take short walks etc, and on day five I finally did the stairs and was allowed home.

I also have to give a shout out to my friends for coming to visit me whilst I was in hospital, they have been the best support system I could have asked for and having them visit really boosted my mood and made a bad situation a lot better.

At home, things were slightly harder as it was frustrating not being able to be independent and do things for myself, but my mum and dad were so helpful and eventually as days went by I got stronger and stronger. I was given a booklet with how to take care of myself in the first few weeks of recovering, and the physios gave me some simple exercises to do as well. I also tried to make sure that as soon as I felt well enough, I did certain things on my own like make myself a drink or get myself some food, as it was important to try and keep being as physical as I could obviously without pushing myself too hard.

In all honesty, around 2-3 weeks after the operation, I was walking pretty much normally again, and I was able to have some level of independence as well. I kept doing the exercises given to me by the physios, and by 4 weeks I felt almost normal, which I still find insane as I genuinely did not expect to be recovering as quickly as I was. In fact, I felt so good that I went back to college two weeks earlier than planned! I obviously did not participate in any physical lessons, however getting back to training in whatever form I could was just so relieving. Everyone around me was so supportive, big shout out to Streisand, and I worked on a reduced timetable for two weeks in order to get used to being back at college again, and also to make sure that I wasn't overdoing anything. 

I saw my surgeon again at the 6 week mark and had some X Rays done. He said that so far everything looked really good and he was really happy with how it's healing, which is great news! I am also going back for another MRI and check up with my surgeon next week for another check up to have a look at how the muscles and everything else are recovering from all the trauma.

Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, I only had a few weeks back at college before I had to come home again, which was quite gutting. However, this does mean that I do have even more recovery time from the surgery, and I have still been able to keep up my training over online Zoom classes. I am finally dancing again, and whilst I still can't push myself too hard, I really didn't think I'd get to this stage again. The spinal fusion means I have some metal in my spine now in order to stabilise it, so in my lower back I now have a cage, metal rods and screws and a carbon fibre disc, which is obviously a lot of metal! I'm still getting used to dancing with all of this going on in my spine, and whilst there is a lot of stiffness in there, the pain from before the surgery is gone which is such a great feeling.   

So at the start of this post I talked about my worries and fears over having such a big surgery as a dancer, but now over 4 months down the line I am feeling so positive about it all. There is a lot more I still need to talk about, as there are other ways that the surgery impacted my body that I wasn't expecting, but I will address those in my next post! I just want to finish off by saying that if anyone reading this is debating having a surgery done as a dancer and is worried about the recovery and everything else afterwards, I really hope you can read this and find a bit of comfort in the fact that it is possible :) The recovery process is long and hard, I have tried to be honest about that, but for me it was so worth it and I am mind blown by how my body has recovered. I still have a way to go but I am determined that I will get there! A surgery is a huge thing to consider but I really hope that this will at least be able to give someone an idea of what to expect.

*I just want to say that I am not a medical professional, I am just writing this to talk about my own experience with my surgery!*