RICE

Posted April 14th, 2006 by jhuny

Rest
Stage manager FB posted a beginners' call for Amalgamate but I was enjoying a delicious seven-dollar steak at the Captain Cook Hotel. By the time the dancers were painting up for Rites I had my right leg up, watching crap re-runs on Foxtel. It's a hard life.

Ice
I guess you could say that my dance career is temporarily on hold for now. Frozen. Like the back of my right calf, thanks to the ice pack that I have wrapped around my leg. No matter. JPB is making sure that I'm well looked after. My only gripe is that he now refers to me as "The Cripple". Or, sometimes, "Hoppy". Luckily I have a sense of humour.

Compression
It was a bit tight for a moment, though. After hobbling off at the end of Amalgamate on Wednesday night I was shephered into the Bangarra Ladies' changeroom where YB offered to give my right calf a bit of a massage. I was still clinging onto the hope that I was just suffering from a massive cramp and just needed it to release. But the more she massaged it the more it hurt. Not good. Meanwhile, the directors and stage management were running around backstage trying to find me. It was obvious in the curtain call, when poor little Jhuny limped on, that something was wrong though no-one had any idea that I was hurting quite early on in the piece. But it was clear then that I couldn't go on for Rites so an emergency mid-interval rehearsal was called to try to fill in the gaps that I left behind. Meanwhile, poor Jhuny started to get quietly emotional but realised that there was still the job of properly rehabilitating myself; I may not have been going on that night but possibly I could get back on stage by the weekend?

Elevation
Not bloody likely. For me it's foot up for at least the next couple of weeks, will complete rehabilitation after six weeks of limited dancing and maximum injury management. One moment, RR was perfectly balanced on my right shoulder and I was about pass her on to NF, as I've done for the past two months in rehearsals and in performance. The next moment I felt a sudden "twang!" in my right calf. There was still half an hour of the dance to go and only one stage exit, which wasn't for at least another twenty minutes or so. No one seemed to notice, though, the show went on. Luckily for me, most of the choreography was quite grounded and though I could only walk around with my legs bent and my body leaning slightly forward, that's pretty much the Bangarra style so I didn't look at all out-of-place. Most of the time...

Anyway, the next day I had my injury diagnosed the next day: a torn calf muscle. And, apparently, a really doozy of a tear. It's going to take the full six weeks to be properly rehabilitated. Great. Six weeks takes me right up to Alice Springs for the up-coming Clan program.

At the very least, it seems like a not-so-uncommon injury. AB director DM made sure my injury was taken care of, and he did a pretty good job too because he had personal experience of it. In the next twenty-four hours other AB dancers spoke to me of their own experiences of torn calf muscles. Every one of those incidents were the same: it came from out of the blue, it would feel like it was completely recovered after a couple of weeks but that was exactly the time when it was prone to re-injury, it would take a good six weeks for a complete recovery. The best of the AB have had it so at the very least I was in good company.

But I'd rather be up and about, running around onstage...

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