Why First Aid Matters for Dancers (Not for the Reason You Think)
Two days ago, I took my third Standard First Aid and CPR/AED certificate course. I needed it for my work as a theatre technician and also as an asset for my upcoming Aquafit certification.
Of course, first aid is important for anyone because it gives you the knowledge on how to deal with acute injuries. But there's an important aspect to receiving and/or offering first aid that many people forget about that can contribute to the outcome, especially for dancers.
My instructor, Samantha, was an absolute hoot. She was clear, concise, and humorous, with a wealth of knowledge to back her up, having been a nurse, ballroom instructor, Health and Safety Officer for one of Canada's largest corporations, and certified somatic practitioner.
In other words, she was the perfect teacher for me because she understood the value of holistic wellness and dance.
Something she said about aid and physiology struck me because it helped me finally realize why my own first aid crisis panned out the way it did. (To read the full story, see The German Ambulance Debacle that Cost Me 820 EUR.)
To recap, I was in Munich last year attending a dance festival when I pulled a back muscle severely in one of my classes. Being the classic dancer, I didn't do anything about it or tell anyone about it, letting it get progressively worse. On the last day of the festival in my morning ballet class, I put my arm out to second position, and I was stuck.
I couldn't move it, I couldn't get it down... I just held my arm like that until the music finally ended, and I excused myself from the room.
After trying to get painkillers from the school staff (they weren't legally allowed to give them to me, and their physiotherapist wasn't in that day), I sat down on the floor with a foam roller and tried to massage it out.
The blockage quickly escalated into searing pain that impacted my breathing; I shook with each inhale and exhale, and I hunched over into a tight ball because that was the only thing that seemed to give me some minor relief. I was on the floor for about twenty minutes.
Finally, I staggered back up to the reception desk and asked if it wouldn't be too dramatic to call for an ambulance. I started weeping uncontrollably; I was in actual agony.
A member of the festival staff, separate from the school staff, came over and asked if I wanted her to call an osteopath, physiotherapist, and/or sports doctor instead. She was concerned the wait at the hospital would take too long.
I let her call anyone she could get a hold of, but everyone was either off work or not unavailable until days later. She told me she could still call an ambulance if I wanted.
YES, PLEASE.
This entire process had taken another 30+ minutes (with another few to answer questions by the first responder), so by the time the paramedics actually arrived, it had been a whole hour since the pain incapacitated me.
The magical thing is, as soon as the staff confirmed an ambulance was coming for me, the pain started to subside. I wasn't in half as much agony when the paramedics got there, even though nothing else I'd done beforehand had helped. I even felt a bit silly as they whipped out all their equipment to check my pulse, blood sugar, and heart rate as I sat on the couch, sweat and tears drying quicker than you could say, "Remedy."
Though it was great that the pain stopped escalating, I thought it was just a tad unfortunate that I had almost nothing to show for my ordeal other than word of mouth and eyewitnesses. Samantha clarified, when I told her about this, that because it was a musculature issue, the paramedics would not have been able to find anything anyway.
Knowing what I know now from her teachings, I realize that my body was experiencing a physiological cooldown from the knowledge that help was on the way.
Our bodies and their various systems (nervous, sympathetic, parasympathatic, circulatory, muscular, respiratory, and more – there are eleven total organ systems) work in tandem to guide our responses to stress and environmental factors. These take the form of physical, mental, and emotional reactions.
It's not that my body couldn't "hold on" long enough for the paramedics to see my pain; in fact, my body was experiencing physiological relief. The active doing (by someone else) of getting proper help told my brain it was finally safe, and in response, it sent neurological signals to the rest of my body's systems to allow it to relax – physically and mentally – which, incidentally, relaxed the muscles in my contracted back.
It's a chain of good responses.
But it took way too long to get to that response. No one should be waiting as long as I did for help. Even five minutes can mean the difference for someone in a life-threatening situation.
Samantha's own anecdote highlighted the importance of timely intervention. She'd driven past a man on the street who was falling periodically, and she pulled up and said, "I know first aid. Can I help you?" The man was eternally grateful.
It turns out he was on his way to the doctor's because the same thing had happened the day before on the subway platform. He had taken a fall out of nowhere and lain on the cold floor for an hour, unsure why his body had failed him. Instead of receiving help, however, no one had batted an eye or even thought to call 9-1-1. Eventually, he was able to get up by himself and make an appointment for his doctor the next day.
Walking on the street by himself, he was stressed that he wouldn't be able to make it. Samantha's kind act of simply asking if he was ok had renewed his faith in humanity.
Being a dancer means being actively and passively attuned to your body's needs and wants, more so than the average person. Our connection to intuition and grounding practices makes us all the more sensitive whenever something goes awry, whether it's an injury or dipping energy levels or even dehydration.
Our highs are high, and our lows are very low.
So why is first aid important for a dancer? Because getting that reassurance, that sense that somebody knows what they're doing and is able to direct you to proper recovery, can make or break the chances of a dancer getting back into the studio faster.
I'm not blaming anyone. There are things I could've done better (asking for professional help immediately; clarifying the urgency of the situation) and things the staff could've done better (taking the initiative to call an ambulance upon the first sight of something wrong).
All of this amounts not to indifference but a lack of consistent training. Too often, I've been in situations where teachers, certified professionals, and managers have ignored both my direct and indirect requests for help with medical issues.
We all think that with time, most things will get better. No one wants to escalate it because that'll open a whole can of incident reports, HR consultations, and legal matters.
Remember, it's not the average person's duty to determine whether or not someone is fine. Let the medical professionals determine that. First aiders are obligated to seek help. There's no training in the world that can emphasize this enough.
Dancers, too, are conditioned from a young age to push through, to set aside personal pain for the greater good (whatever that means). We are taught that if our sprained ankle isn't better in two weeks, we won't be in the show. If our broken bone doesn't heal properly, we'll never dance again.
So, ironically, we drag ourselves back into training prematurely in the hopes of making the show, of dancing again. But it's killing us.
So often dancers are taught to listen to our bodies but ignore the warning signs when they're most prominent. We don't recognize that recovery is a systemic process or the healing properties of the mind-body connection.
When a dancer becomes injured, then, it's imperative for the dancer themselves to recognize the severity of the injury and also for the people around them to provide care. One call to emergency services, one gentle rub on the back, the reassurance that there is always time for healing... this is how to get a dancer back on their feet.
So when I tore my ACL a second time dancing in Vienna, I didn't wait this time. But, that's another story.
