A little Vanity

I do my best to avoid indulging my vanity but I fail most of the time. I am notorious for short workout fads to improve my bikini profile- yes I have done P90X. That 3 month stent into workout hell left me 7 lbs heavier and incredibly buff- but not in the good way. I had amazing triceps but this (see pic)  was not the look I was going for.

   After 9 months of ballet 3-4 days a week I have not noticed any changes in my body- until I returned to take care of America's Veteran's. Six months ago I was rotating at the VA and could fit into the xtra-small scrubs but it was not the comfortable fit you need when hammering away at a knee. I have now returned to the VA and have been pleasantly surprised that I have a comfortable fit in those xtra-small scrubs with room for all the musculoskeletal carpentry I want. Between ballet and the great upper body work I get from putting in a total knee I might just be ready to don the bikini on my ten-year wedding anniversary!

Class With Kathy Mata

Recently I was in San Francisco for an orthopaedic surgeon conference. I was slated to give a presentation on my research in shoulder surgery to a crowd of full of  long in tooth experts. The thought terrified me. I am dealthy afraid of public speaking and usually I spend my time trying to hid behind the podium.

While in town I took class at the Alonso King Lines Ballet Studio with Kathy Mata, renowned on You Tube for her adult classes. This thought did NOT terrify me.

I had it the wrong way around.

I thought Ms. Mata's class would be good but maybe not as hard as the intermediate/advanced classes I take at my two home studios. I was woefully mistaken on this point. First of all the room was about 90 deg, the class was packed with people, and I felt some pressure to at least look more graceful that the 2 gentleman who clearly had medicare cards. Second, I was not used to teachers paying me any attention. Usually my teachers spend a lot of time correcting the teenagers who are taking extra classes in preparation for a professional career while I hang in the back and try to disappear. I am not faulting my teachers at all- I think they can pick up on my look of terror/confusion and try not to overload my brain with corrections. I am usually grateful they leave me alone.

  There was no hiding from Ms. Mata- she picked up on everything I did incorrectly. Interestingly, she seemed to understand which corrections would be most beneficial for me.Of the myriad of mistakes I made, she found the five or so that changed my dancing. In addition, she did not stop between sides and her combinations were longer than the combinations I am used to. All those things made the class physically challenging as well as mentally challenging. This class was my far the hardest thing I have done, physically or mentally, for quite a long time.

How did the talk go the next day?
 Cake Walk.
 I had just been to a ballet class the night before where there was no place to hide doing something I constantly screwed up.  I didn't need to hide behind the podium to talk about something I already knew like the back of my hand.

Thank you Kathy Mata.

Close your eyes

Sometimes I find it very hard to check my day at the door when I step into ballet class. Usually this results from some problem at work and is related to a self-perception of incompetence in the operating room. My brain turns "oh my god I am a moron who can't even fix this very simple fracture that I am sure all the boys can fix, etc." into "whoa what is the combination again? You want HOW may pirouettes? Fat chance!..." and I decompensate from there. I think this happens to a lot of us and manifests in other ways- such as "you want me to help you with your algebra homework? Fat chance!" or "there is no way I am making it the whole 5 miles I am supposed to run today..." I get that negativity is a poor way to live and and I should have a positive outlook but I'm not exactly the kind of person who can give myself a good pep talk and rise above self-doubt. So what's a girl to do? I pay good money for class and I HATE to ruin a class in this manner. My solution is to close my eyes during the plie combination. Once the combo is explained and the 4 beat preparation is over I just just close my eyes and listen. I listen to the tone and pitch of the music. I listen to my legs, my feet, my arms, and my back as I move through the positions. I forget about the really good girl in class, I don't watch her. I don't compare myself to her, she doesn't exist. (Any adult dancer will empathize with me here as every class has one of these girls- my class happens to be populated by several of them and they are about 15 years old). I'm sure I look like a nutcase but I don't care. It works. Its like a reset button somehow. I can't explain how it works but when I do this my class goes really well and I can finally get rid of my crappy day. Apparently we don't all need a pep talk in dogged determination. Some of us just need a moment of pause.

Its Okay to Learn

   One of the things I love about ballet is that its okay to screw up- in fact I do it with every plie, every tendu, and certainly every pirouette. Everyone knows that professionals are not perfect 100% of the time, so we are all starting from this position of trying to attain perfection. But the fact that we do not attain  perfection is a given and usually we don't get upset about not having a perfect class or performance or whatever.  When teachers correct us in class they are validating our attempt to improve- and usually they get really excited when we do improve.
    Surgical training is not this way. There is no room for imperfection because the stakes are so much higher. My surgical teachers have no praise for improvement- they just let me know when I have screwed up and that imperfections are not acceptable. This is a very disheartening way to learn.
   Surgery and ballet both involve the pursuit of perfection but there is an expectation of actually achieving perfection in surgery  and that expectation does not exist in any art form- even though medicine is often described as both an art and a science. Why is there this expectation in surgery? Why can't we allow for human imperfections?

 Because no one wants an imperfect machine cutting on  grandma.

   Expectations of surgeons drive us to become almost robotic in our performance of surgery. This sounds crazy when you think about the fact that you have an imperfect machine (the surgeon) working on another imperfect machine (the patient) and we expect perfect and predictable results every time! Surgeons already need a certain amount of dissociation in order to actually hammer into live people, and this expectation of a robotic performance drives away our humanity even more. Then we are expected to put on our human faces again when we talk to patients who are awake. If we screw up in either area we risk getting sued. Thank goodness that most people are willing to accept a little imperfection!

And so when I go to class this week I am thankful that  no one dies or sues me when I fall over midway though adagio. That alone is worth way more than the $15 I pay for class.

Saturday Class

I take 3-4 classes a week but Saturday class is by far my favorite for several reasons.
1) Its on Saturday at 1:45 pm. At this time of day the Nurses are all in the middle of shift at the hospital, so no change of shift confusion calls to my pager. The patients are all usually napping because they have just eaten an gotten their pain medication, so no patient care issues. Its too early in the day for people to be leaving the bars drunk, so the Emergency Room usually leaves me alone. All this means that my pager, which I carry inside my leotard during class, is mercifully quiet.
2) After class I can go home an veg out by cleaning my usually disgusting house. This gives my a double feeling of accomplishment for the day.
3) My favorite reason that Saturday class is the best- there are usually two ladies who are over 50 in the class. They are not afraid to ask the teacher to repeat combinations- which I am ALWAYS grateful for- and they are not afraid to make self-deprecating comments that lighten the mood and make me forget about the 2 teenage  bun heads doing triple pirouettes.  They usually encourage me and remind me that dancing is a joy at any age. I aspire to be as confident and kind as these ladies when I am in my 50's and beyond!

The Anatomy of Turnout

Recently I have been thinking a LOT about turnout- who doesn't? Everyone wants better turnout, every teacher is always reminding me about turnout- especially while I'm jumping. This week as I was replacing a hip, I got to thinking about turnout. During the surgical approach for a hip replacement we take off several muscles called the short external rotators- the gemelli, obturators, and piriformis muscles  (picture of these muscles during surgery below). These muscles start in your pelvis and attach to the greater trochanter, which is that part of your hip bone that you can feel - unless you have some love handles like me!  These muscles plus a part of the gluteus muscles, are was give you dynamic tunrout- turnout that you can change. I was detaching these on a lady and thinking- "Thank God I don't need a hip replacement or my turnout would be terrible."  I know, its a ridiculous thought. But it got me thinking what else is responsible for my turnout and why are my develope's so much higher when I am turned in?
 

Part of the the answer is the hip flexor anatomy.  Hip flexion comes from the psoas muscle, the rectus femoris, and the sartorious.  The psoas comes from the pelvis and attaches to  inside of the hip- its a HUGE muscles that makes up the tendorloin cut of meat in animals.  The rectus femoris also comes from the pelvis but attaches to your knee cap- allowing you to flex your hip and extend your leg but doesn't give you any turnout. The rectus is also a big muscle that you can feel and even see in some people. Hip flexion is also aided be the sartorius muscle. Called the tailor's muscle the sartorius starts up by the pelvis and crosess the knee- making it one of the few muscles that cross 2 joints. This is a really puny muscle but it attaches to the INSIDE/FRONT of the knee so it both extends the knee and "presents the heel" in the extended position.

    Some of everyone's turnout also comes from the specific bony anatomy of the hip- called anteversion. Anteversion of the hip gives you natural turnout and was a really difficult concept for me to grasp but suffice to day that you can't change it. As an adult, what ever anterversion you have is what you are going to have unless some surgeon cuts your bone and rotates it. We can change it a little in kids by having them sit "indian style" and avoiding "W" sitting and even then the anterversion only changes slightly. But if you started ballet as an adult your anteversion is fixed.

 So pretty much ALL of my turnout comes from the short external rotators and the sartorius-  all which are really tiny. When you are turned out in extension, the tiny  rotators and puny sartorius externally rotate the hip and place my already tight hamstrings on even more stretch. Then they have to fight my big hamstring muscles to get my leg up in that nice turned out position. When I am turned in, the hamstings are looser and the psoas and rectus have an easier time of things.

Thinking about this made me feel better about my terrible turnout and even more in awe of people who can do this...

About Me

About Me


I returned to ballet because of a hurricane. I spent my whole life becoming a surgeon; I had just started my orthopaedic residency when a hurricane came and destroyed my hospital. I packed up my husband, my dogs and found a new residency in the frozen north, far away from  everything I knew: family, friends, the SEC, and sweet tea.
I had to repeat a year of residency, adding yet another year to my 9 years of post-college education. I had to do something with the house I owned in that hurricane ravaged town I left. I had to prove myself in my new job. I had to support my husband, who had a difficult time finding work in our new town and was a little peeved about the whole situation.  I had lost everything I owned. I had a lot going on. I had no help.

So I did what any modern career woman would do- I went to therapy.

Three months of weekly therapy at $25 a session and all I got was how screwed up my mother was- a fact I wholly disagree with. I needed a different game plan, something to completely take my mind off of my life, even for an hour.  So I decided to take ballet.

I took ballet until I was 11 or twelve and then stopped for some reason I can't even remember. I did remember that I loved it and that in ballet class the outside world disappeared. I have now been taking ballet for about a year at two local studios. My life has improved significantly, even if  my dancing has made only modest gains.
 
So these are my chronicles of re-starting ballet, at 31, while working 80 hours a week trying to become perfect at something else (surgery). Should be fun!