I auditioned for select parts of the College dance recital and had been mainly selected for a duet and smaller group dances.
It was quite an honor being selected as being a modern, jazz and ballet dancer had never been part of my life until my sophomore year of High School. To say I was incredible would be highly exaggerated, but I did love it enough that I worked very hard to improve at any opportunity.
Days at this time were filled with eight hours of dancing and rehearsing. For quite some time, my right leg had been really bothering me, enough that walking from my car in the parking lot to the studio dance hall was excruciating. The pain traveled from hip clear down to the tips of my toes. Dancing through the pain for a little while only worked short term because there came with this difficulty breathing. Other dancers floated effortlessly across the floor, their winded breath lasted a short while, and they were able to work through the intense practicing. On the other hand, I had to sit out from a lot practice time to catch my breath and allow for my leg to recover.
During one of the recital duet rehearsals, my leg began to throb horribly. As the music progressed, the choreography for the lift approached. The pain of the leg and difficulty breathing was so intense that I ended up ramming my partner in the shoulder. He was hurt bad enough that he had to rest from rehearsals for two days and ice. At this time, one of the instructors let me know that dancing in her number would not work, and the duet number was also changed and given to an understudy. I had only two numbers left to perform in and I was heartbroken that all that hard work had to be given up because my leg and oxygen intake was handicapping me.
Finally, after long awaiting, my parents and I went in to the cardiology appointment scheduled to discuss the possibility of surgery in the right leg and receive a referral to a vascular surgeon for this procedure. Months prior, we had met with the cardiologist and discussed the leg, but had decided to allow time for the leg to create a new pathway for blood, as it had done so when I was just a toddler. We had hoped that dancing for hours a day would push the body to create new routes for the blood.
I remember the pain was so intense that after performing the recital group number I went to the back, lied down, and cried while squeezing my thigh with both hands. The pain of lack of oxygen and blood flow to a limb is extremely painful, and I was ready to have it repaired. This would be the second repair.Sitting in the cardiologist office after having finished routine EKG and Echo tests, the doctor looked at my parents and I and held up a poster of the heart.
"Now, I know you are here for the leg. But let's take a moment to talk about the heart." He looked through his scholarly glasses with silver trim at us. We all must have looked a bit perplexed for several seconds because we had not come for my heart. All this pain for several months (about a year) was entirely for the leg. The heart was fine, and had been fine for years and years.
The cardiologist began to explain that the pulmonary valve was leaking and that it needed to be repaired within the next six months. Even though the leg seemed to need repaired, the heart had to come first as it was a top priority.
If the pulmonary valve was left in this condition, the blood pumping would leak into the right ventricle thus deteriorating the ventricles ability to squeeze and pump. Imagine it like a balloon that you fill with water and it begins to sag and stretch.
So, with the knowledge of this we left the cardiologist office and scheduled my fifth open heart surgery for March 2005.
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