My usual Sunday morning ritual when I’m in town, is to take an 8:30 am dance class at my nearby fitness club. Three days a week I take Zumba, the dance workout that draws from the Afro-Cuban rhythms of the salsa, mambo, samba, and cha-cha. But Sunday is an eclectic modern dance class consisting of simple movements and phrases our teacher Laurie has created and taught in her children’s classes. After a stretching warm up we get our heart rates up as we waltz, skip, slide, and jump. And as with all the dance classes I’ve ever taken or taught, we leave class feeling energized and relaxed in ways that seem to last throughout the day.
On this particular morning, which was to change my life dramatically, the studio was humid, (the air conditioner had not been turned on yet), and the surface of the floor had become sticky. As we traveled across the floor in sliding motions, four counts facing our partners, four counts turning our backs to them, my feet stuck to the floor and my body kept moving. Failing to get my feet back under me, the movement pattern ended in a thump and a splat, with me sprawled out on the wooden floor facedown on my stomach. The pain throbbing in my left shoulder told me, “DO NOT MOVE.”
Struggling to catch my breath and to control the pain, I began audible deep breathing. A classmate, whose voice came from my left side, spontaneously became my breath coach. As if I were in the labor phase of childbirth, her reassuring voice encouraged me, “That’s it, just inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.” From the center of the room, someone asks me for my husband’s phone number and I tell them how to reach him using my cell phone. I hear the person leaving the message on his voice mail, “Your wife has fallen in her dance class. She’s injured but she’s ok. She’s conscious and she’s breathing.”
