A chapter at a time

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'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 ...