How Dance Has Affected My Life
By: Emma
We were working on attitude turns. I could feel my back muscles tighten as I brought my leg up, and I pushed to keep my arms in front of me. There was no music playing, we were each in our own little worlds trying to perfect these turns, and it seemed like nothing could break our concentration. But all of a sudden something caught my eye in the mirror. My turn faltered and I fell out of it quite ungracefully. Something had broken the line of my neck. Upon closer examination, I saw that it was a lump about the size of a small egg, just above my collarbone. If I hadn’t been a dancer and attuned to my body, I might not have noticed it, but I knew my body well, and I knew that that lump was not supposed to be there. The next day I went to the doctor. I went through a countless number of examinations until they came up with a diagnosis: Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a type of cancer. Treatment started fairly quickly afterwards, and I was in the hospital for a few days each week receiving chemotherapy. I lost weight and stamina—I got nauseous just from walking up the stairs too quickly. It seemed that the only thing to do would be to just lie in bed and hope that this horrible process would be over quickly. But I did just the opposite. Each day I went to dance class just as before. I was weaker than before, and I couldn’t do all that I used to be able to, but it was worth it. I would spend days at the hospital, undergoing a series of stressful tests and receiving awful medications, and then I could go into dance, where I could ignore everything except for the teacher and the music. And after spending long hours in the stark hospital, I could then go and immerse myself in the beauty of ballet. I was also incredibly lucky to have wonderful teachers and classmates who took my illness in stride. They didn’t seem to mind that even though I was a bun-head I didn’t have a bun, and they didn’t treat me differently from any of the other dancers when giving corrections or just teaching class.
My treatment lasted for months (which is actually thankfully shorter than it would have been had I not found the tumor early on—again thanks to dance), but finally I did recover. I came out of the experience with a deeper appreciation for dance, and I was excited to see how much more I could improve now that I could finally dance to my fullest. Also, knowing that I can stay committed to dance even when my world has been turned upside down has made me even more confident of my love for it. After all, if cancer can’t stop my dancing, nothing can. Dance has really been a lifesaver—literally.
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