Unit 3 Section 2Exercise 4The body disabled: Chiao-Ping Li
Clinical correlate 2: Foot, ankle and knee injuries
Chiao-Ping Li is a dancer whose life changed completely one day, without warning, in a car accident that detroyed her foot. The images you see below are of Chiao-Ping. This page includes Chiao-Ping’s story, videos of dances she choreographed, and images of her foot. Read her story, click on the images and video icons, and follow the links as indicated. Chiao-Ping's story in dance and words
The accident
This is Chiao-Ping.
  
Chiao-Ping's ordeal
My partner and I were just driving into campus. It was January. There was no sign of anything dangerous. Then we slipped on black ice. The firefighters had to cut open the car to get me out.
They were going to amputate my foot. I’d have to get used to wearing a prosthetic, the orthopedic surgeon said. I lay there facing a real identity crisis. I was a dancer. I had a full plate ahead of me—performing and company work. Fortunately my partner Douglas was by my side during my whole recovery and he advocated for me. Probably if it hadn’t been for his insistence—I’m a dancer and I need my foot--they probably would have just cut it off. In the hospital
I had 8 surgeries. Foot anatomy (See also Alice Jones' poem, "The Foot.")
In the hospital one of the small victories that we concentrated on was that blood would flow through my leg. We focused on the pulse meter, almost like meditation. I would try to make it beep. It became this emblem for life and our hope. The next step was dangling. I had to train my leg to dangle again, to deal with gravity, after being propped up above my heart level for six weeks. I dangled for one minute and then another minute and a half. When the doctor took the pins out that was another positive step to keep me going. x-ray
At first I had a hopeful attitude--that I would heal and dance again. I was under the assumption that like much of the rest of my life I could muscle my way through it. But then at a certain point there weren’t any more obvious positive steps. I became quite impatient and discouraged. For a couple of years of I poured a lot of my own money into healers and supplements, massage therapy and acupuncture. It was a full time job trying to recover. I would get up and go to work--and my work was going to the gym, or going to this doctor or that doctor. I finally had to deal with all that I had denied and face the reality of the situation, which was “well, maybe this is it, maybe this is as good as it is going to get.”
Grieving the loss was an important stage. It was very painful for me and my partner (who by then had become my husband). He had been the driver and there were a lot of interpersonal issues around that. Intellectually I knew it was an accident and it wasn’t his fault but on the other hand, I still blamed him. His own pain didn’t get addressed for a very long time. We’re still together so I guess it’s a good sign that we made it through the hardest time of our relationship.
I began concentrating on choreography. My performers are not just professional dancers. I include people from the community or who may have a disability of some sort.
Click here for an example of Ciao-Ping's work with community dancers, such as the elderly. old man
The dancers have shared their own personal experiences—for example, one parent who’d been dying of a long illness. I worked with this young man who had cancer. Being a dancer--like athletes, you feel somewhat immortal, somewhat superhuman. When you do get knocked down, you appreciate for the first time or maybe the second time that you’re not alone and everyone suffers.
Study Questions
1. Look at the pictures of Chiao-ping dancing. After reading her story, what do these pictures mean to you? Is there a change in how you respond to them?
2. Trace the different phases of Chiao-Ping’s coping with her illness. Do you recognize in these a pattern representative of coping with loss? Identify the positive coping skills of the narrator.
3. Compare and contrast the written story with the ‘dance’ representation of Chiao-Ping’s accident.
Explain the differences in impact. What effect do the other dance clips have on you? Given what you know about Chiao-Ping’s story, what are they saying?
4. How might Chiao-Ping’s story help you in assisting patients with similar illnesses?
5. What is the doctor’s role in this process? Which health professional would be likely to have the most impact?
6. Discuss the role of the partner in this. You might try writing a paragraph from his point of view, for example while Chiao-Ping is in the phase of going to physical therapy and acupuncture. Say why you think the relationship survived.
7. Read the following abstracts. Tie the findings of these observational and review studies to Chiao-ping’s story.
A. Wainwright SP. Williams C. Turner BS. Fractured identities: injury and the balletic body. Health: an Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness & Medicine. 9(1):49-66, 2005 Jan.
Social worlds shape human bodies and so it is inevitable that there are strong relationships between the body, professional dance and identity. In this article we draw on Bourdieu's notions of habitus, and various forms of capital, as the main theoretical framework for our discussion. Our ethnography of the balletic body elicited dancers and ex-dancers' perceptions of their bodies and sought to reveal some of the facets of their embodied habitus. The sheer physicality of their working lives - of feeling exhausted, sweaty and out of breath - is something dancers (like all athletes) become 'addicted to'. Ageing and injury can reveal this compulsion to dance and so dancers invariably find it very difficult to, for example, give up class once they retire from the stage; or miss a performance if they have a 'slight injury'. In other words, the vocational calling to dance is so overwhelming that their balletic body is their identity. In addition, there is an unremitting loop between individual habitus and institutional habitus (the ballet company), which affects both the meaning and management of injury. All our informants at the Royal Ballet ( London: n = 20) had suffered dance injuries. The injured, dancing body is perceived as an inevitable part of a career in ballet. Everyone spoke of the improved athleticism of dancers, and of the expansion in facilities to maintain healthy dancers. However, most dancers can expect several major injuries during their careers. Such epiphanies force dancers to confront their embodiment, and their thoughts invariably turn to their body, career and self. Critical injuries threaten to terminate a dancer's career and so endanger their embodied sense of self. On a more everyday level, dancing and performing with painful, niggling injuries is the norm. Florence Nightingale School of Nursing, King's College London, UK.
B. Kelman, B B.Occupational hazards in female ballet dancers. Advocate for a forgotten population. AAOHN Journal. 48(9):430-4, 2000 Sep.
1. Personal, economical, psychological, and physical factors increase a ballet dancer's stress, which can result in a higher risk for injuries. 2. Ballet dancers experience injuries to the foot, ankle, knee, hip, or back. The constant fear of injuries is universal among dancers because injuries can lead to permanent disability and the end of their ballet career. 3. Although early treatment of injuries is critical, there are multiple barriers to receiving treatment. Some of the barriers include misunderstanding from the health care community, cost of treatment, time constraints, fear of unemployment, and dancers' viewing injuries and pain as a way of life. 4. Occupational health nurses are in an excellent position to start programs in this unexplored area of occupational health nursing. Nurses must advocate for this population of workers and help dancers in their battle against injury, pain, disability, and psychological distress. Seattle University School of Nursing, Seattle, WA, USA.
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