Free Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet by Jenifer Ringer Page B

pack of ice and watched the class withblank eyes as it resumed, not really seeing anything. I took the ice off my foot to check on it. It was turning purple, and a ridge of swollen skin was rising as if it were on a fault line.
    In disbelief, I called my mom to come pick me up. She was just as devastated as I was and in full protective mode. She refused the offer of crutches, probably because that would mean we were admitting defeat. We went to a doctor in a taxi.
    He took X-rays and then presented us with the news.
    “Looks like you’ve broken your fifth metatarsal,” he told me kindly. “Now, it’s just a hairline fracture, so if you really want to do those performances, I can tape you up real good so that you can do it.”
    I looked at the doctor for a moment, taken aback. Is that what real dancers did? Did they dance on broken bones? Should I do that? Perhaps he was just testing me. I couldn’t tell. I knew that Workshop was the most important event of an SAB student’s year. I knew that to be asked into the New York City Ballet, or any other company of repute, for that matter, I had to dance Workshop. I knew that if I didn’t do Workshop, I would have to put my dreams on hold and come back next year to try again. It was a devastating thought.
    But my foot
hurt.
I couldn’t bear to stand on it at all. It looked like an eggplant. I knew there was no way I could dance on it, and I knew that even Workshop was not important enough to make me crazy enough to dance on a broken foot.
    I was given crutches and sent home. That night my mom somehow sweet-talked another doctor, Dr. Louis Galli, into paying a house call to give us a second opinion. I believe it was Dr. Galli’s first and only house call, and he became my favorite doctor for the rest of my career. He often reminds me of how he came to my pink bedroom and looked at my eggplant foot while I was in my flowered pajamas. Dr. Galli confirmed the diagnosis, and I resigned myself to six weeks without dance to allow my foot to heal.
    I didn’t go to watch Workshop. It was just too hard to be missing it.
    —
    I n a lot of ways, that first catastrophic injury was good for me. I learned a lot of lessons during the recovery that I was able to apply during the course of future injuries. Even while my foot was broken, I learned there were other things I could do to stay strong. Since the year was almost over at SAB, I didn’t have to go and watch classes while I recuperated. The teachers told me to heal and come and take the summer course classes when I was ready. I started going to Pilates and discovered that I could hop one-legged around the studio from machine to machine. The instructors would put a cuff around my ankle so that I wouldn’t use my foot. They loved having ballerinas and would come up with all kinds of crazy exercises to confound me and make me sore. This was probably the first time I realized I had stomach muscles.
    I also learned that it was important to come back slowly and methodically from injuries. Stanley Williams saw me on the sidewalk one day, and in his typical Zen master fashion he gave me a nugget of wisdom to take home with me.
    “The slower you come back, the faster you come back,” he said, gazing at me with his deep brown eyes. I smiled and nodded, but didn’t understand his advice.
    As soon as I could, I was back in ballet class and even in rehearsals, trying to be ready to go on a fantastic trip SAB was taking to Holland in order to perform with the Kirov Ballet School as part of an early fall festival. I was to dance
Serenade
and the lead in another Balanchine ballet,
Valse-Fantasie.
But in the middle of one of my rehearsals, my foot began to hurt again.
    This time I had a stress reaction on one of my metatarsals, a precursor to a stress fracture. It came from coming back to ballet too quickly and not having the muscular support around my bones to protect them from the difficult physical activity. I was sidelined again, though I