Injuries are extraordinarily common in dance. This is largely because it is such a physical activity and it forces your body to move in ways that aren’t entirely natural. It’s actually a little surprising that dancers don’t get injured more often than they do.

That being said, dancers tend to not really be the best with injuries.

One of the best ways to treat injuries is to rest them. However, many dancers are practically allergic to rest. We usually try to just work around the issue rather than address it and let ourselves get better. The closer you get to a show, the more likely dancers are to ignore any injuries they have, trying to get back to normal while still dancing full out on a strained tendon or a pulled muscle.

I recently tore my meniscus, which is the cartilage in between the bones in the knee. Actually, we only recently diagnosed it, but it’s been injured for a while. It took me a week after it first got injured to even bring it up to my dance teacher and another two weeks after that to go see a doctor about it. Although meniscus injuries are typically pretty serious, mine was deemed alright enough for me to continue dancing on it through Nutcracker. After that, I’m going to have to get an MRI so we can make sure I don’t need surgery, though the doctor said that that is very unlikely. In the mean time, it’s going to be painful, but I’m going to keep dancing as much as I can.