Luke shares a few insights into dealing with the frustrations and struggles of coping with an injury.
Hello dancers. It’s Luke, the Ballet Physio here.
Today I wanted to share a personal story. I have a problem with my knee at the moment, and it’s a little bit embarrassing actually to be a physio walking around on crutches, but I don’t know why I’m embarrassed. Most people will get injuries at some point.
This is not actually an injury, it’s an inflammation that’s sort of happening on its own. It’s not through any movement that I did or any accident that I had, and I just wanted to share a few insights into what my experience is of having a joint problem that’s making me struggle to get around as I’m sure a lot of my patients have experienced before.
“And a lot of dancers, if they haven’t yet, will experience it probably at some point. So it’s frustrating, isn’t it?”
And that uncertainty can be really difficult to sort of get your head around. You kind of think, “well, I want to make a definite plan”, but often when it comes to medicine, there are no definite plans. We know roughly how long people in general take, but because everyone’s different and everyone’s condition is different, it’s impossible to put an exact timeframe on it. So that can be a challenge as the person on the receiving end of that, to think, “well, what do I plan for?”.
Some other challenges that come about too is that it’s uncomfortable, so it means that I’m not walking as normal. As I said, I’m on crutches. I can limp around for short distances, but of course, you should try and avoid that, which I do. I do it for short distances only. It’s still good to get some pressure through my knee at the moment with the way that it is. Sometimes it’s important to have no pressure through it at all, so that’s a different situation.
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