By: Veronica Kogan

I have had quite a few injuries in my time. Honestly, if there was an Olympic gold medal for “most injuries in a short amount of time,” it would be dangling around my neck.

It all started in second grade. I was playing around at the top of my driveway when I realized that I had not yet irritated my older sister, Gabby. Anxious to complete my task, I galloped down the steep driveway. As I slammed down my left foot, I suddenly felt it twist and emit an unnatural crack. I thought nothing of it until a couple days later, when a radiating pain crawled up my foot and found a nice apartment in my bones to move into and raise a family. After a week, my mom was carrying me and my football-sized foot over her shoulder to the bone doctor’s office. He examined and diagnosed me with two fractures in my left foot, ordering me a cast. I remember feeling strangely satisfied, because this meant my sister would be doing all the heavy lifting around the house, while I’d be relaxing in a cushioned chair watching Seinfeld. The doctor wiped that smirk off my face, however, when he ordered me to stop dancing—not only until the cast was off, but for the next four months. In my dance classes, we had already been learning the final recital dances in preparation for the big showcase in May. By the end of the appointment, all I could think about was the showcase I had to drop and how behind I would be in comparison to my ballet friends.

The following year was yet another year of the foot. I was playing tennis this time. My right foot must’ve been jealous of the attention the left side had received last year, because I felt a knife-sharp pain in my right ankle during one of my serves. My mom carried me to the bone doctor yet again, where he diagnosed me with a sprained ankle. I walked out with a massive black boot and even more worry than I had last year—the injury had occurred at the exact same time as the previous one, so I would have to step down from this year’s showcase too. I was heartbroken.

I registered for dance again the following year, and trouble inevitably ensued. I bet you thought it would be just another broken bone, right? Wrong. This one happened while I was already sick at home with a sinus infection. I got the brilliant idea to stand on a tiny chair to reach for my favorite Roald Dahl book. Leaning just a tad too far, my chair buckled underneath me and sent my head into a hard slam against the wooden floor. I must have passed out, because I woke up a couple minutes later, confused and dizzy. I looked in the mirror and saw that the fall had bent the metal in my braces. After the mind-splitting headache kicked in, it was time to make my annual visit to the doctor’s office. They told me that I had a concussion. Not only would I have to quit another year of dancing, but I would also have to stay out of school to give my brain time to unscramble itself.

It took me a year to recover, just in time for my most awkward injury (and let me remind you that I had registered for another year of dance.). I was on the school playground, doing a crab-crawl inside of a neon green tunnel with rock-sized bumps lining the floor. I bumped into one of them, and, with my amazing luck, twisted and bone-bruised my tailbone. I spent the rest of the year in humiliation, carrying around a blue cushion with a cutout that allowed me to sit down. Another year of dance down the drain—are you seeing a pattern here?

Well, apparently, I was clueless. I stayed in dance for two more years. During the first year, a girl kicked me in the knee after getting pissed off during class, dislocating my knee cap. My last year of dance entailed my most ridiculous injury—I was skipping out of my room and hit my pinkie toe against the frame, fracturing the tiniest bone in my body. That’s when I finally came to my senses and decided that dance might not be worth the annual doctor’s fee, and I quit altogether.

I’ve gone back to the studio since then, since my sister dances there. Even though I have to hide my face from my disappointed ballet teacher every time, I don’t regret quitting. I haven’t had an injury since—knock on wood!

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