Small Victories

Today was my first small victory, and as small as it is I still smile about it. Up til now every time I went to my cardiac rehab I'd have to sit down and rest after setting up my heart monitor because my heart rate would be around 140. Today I got to start right away and it took some work to get my heart to my target rate. That's a huge difference for me.

Realistically, yes I still have a long way to go before I'm back to normal. Yes, by the end of my workout my heart was a little mad. Yes, it wore me out and I had to rest.

But after my workout, I stretched standing, which I literally haven't been able to do for years. It was one of those moments when I felt the smallest bit like my old self again. My hands went straight to ballet mode and it made me smile. I used to get so many notes in every other dance class to stop using "ballet hands". My flexibility is nowhere near where it used to be, but I still have both splits and I can stretch without blacking out. To make it better, in a couple weeks I can start resistance stretching and small weights a little after that. I guess the biggest victory in this is that I don't see myself in medical limbo anymore. Today was the first day I saw improvement, the first day I felt like the person I used to be. Maybe with some work I can make it back to being that person, I hope so at least. After being sick for so long it's going to be strange coming back to "normal" life. And hard. Relating to people that say things like, "I left my coffee on the roof of my car. God hates me. I can't take it." (and yes, that's a direct quote) is almost laughable. I want to reply that God has so many more issues to deal with that the placement of your morning coffee and the minor detail of you spacing it out.

I think it's a blessing we don't know the future. Things that I thought were the end of the world years ago just make me laugh now. I feel like the small catastrophes in our youth are there to strengthen us for the real challenges in our futures. I thought getting diagnosed with Celiac when I was thirteen and living in a small town in Wyoming was such a big deal, dealing with the idea of forever right when I entered the teen years. Eleven years ago if you said you had "Celiac" or that you needed "gluten free" people stared at you like you were speaking Greek. My family visited my Gram in New England and I remember asking a waitress at a restaurant if the clam chowder had flour in it and the waitress responded, "No, but it does have wheat, is that ok?". Really. Now, Celiac is insanely easy to manage, thanks very much to the Atkin's diet introducing the idea of burgers and sandwiches without the bun. Also, thanks to fad diet people taking the term "diet" a little too literally. I won't judge.

Something that one of my best friends said to me was that one of the good things coming from all of this is that it brought me back to what's important to me. After my spine surgery I walked away from professional dance. My surgeon was adamant in making sure I understood how serious the injury was and that professional dance was not an option with my back. Pretty sure when someone shows me an image of a vertebral disk cutting into my spinal cord I understand the severity of the situation, but I appreciate the gesture. The whole thing could have ended so differently, and I will never forget the people that fought to make sure I didn't end up in a wheelchair. The surgery was done microscopically, so even five to ten years ago the surgery wouldn't have been a possibility. My scar is only a little over an inch long (right next to a freckle that my doctor teased was his "landmark"). It's so small that I joked with him, asking for a bigger scar. His answer was no, surprisingly enough, he didn't think a bigger scar would make my story better. I still think it would have. When I came back to school people saw the scar and said, "Oh, I thought it was a serious surgery...". My surgeon used internal stitches and surgical glue to seal the incision so the dressing that I had to change out was neosporin and a bandaid. Literally. So incredibly anti-climatic. I actually had one friend say, "Oh sweetie, I understand how hard all of this is for you. I had mono." Somehow with the surgery being performed microscopically it was downgraded to mono? I'm not sure I'll ever understand the thought process behind that.

Looking back now, I think walking away from all of the arts was a mistake. Yes, I love the law and I always will, but even three years later the one thing that excites and intrigues me is the arts. I still have music, I can write, I love playing with choreography and production and I think there's a lot of ground I could cover in the arts. I also think they're necessary. Not in terms of life or death, but in terms of release and expression. Being involved in something that is centered around bringing people joy and a break from whatever life is throwing at them is the most rewarding thing for me. Dance was always my coping mechanism, and I know that music and the arts do the same for others. We use music and movement and pictures to say the things our hearts need to express. It goes beyond words. To me, dance is the language of the heart. Before we spoke, we danced. Even if I can't be a professional ballerina like I used to dream, I can bring the arts to people. I hate the systems that medicine and law have turned into, but I can love them from a distance. I absolutely believe that everything happens for a reason. With all of this, literally everything that had an influence on me, money, a fit body, a career, my health and a lot of relationships were stripped away. I think I needed this to learn how to fight for myself, instead of letting everyone and everything influence my life. I listened to other people, peers, teachers, doctors. I followed their advice, even when it was toxic. I did what they said I should do without question and it was me that got screwed by it.

I don't know exactly what I'll do career-wise, I'm interested in almost every aspect of the creative process. It'll be interesting to see where life take me from here, and for the first time in a long while, I'm finally starting to believe it will happen. That's a victory worth celebrating.