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The secret of my recovery: dancer Kim Okamura shares some lessons she and others have learned about coming back from an injury.

Article Excerpt
I was a second-year corps member when I hurt my knee. One minute I was rehearsing William Forsythe's In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, and the next I was sitting in San Francisco Ballet's third-floor P.T. office with my knee under a bag of ice, wondering what happened.

"You're going to be out for at least a year," the doctor would tell me the next day. I had shredded my anterior cruciate ligament--one of the knee joint's primary stabilizers--and would be off for a full 16 months, as it turned out. It was the first time I'd spent more than a week away from ballet since fifth-grade summer camp, and the first time I'd ever dealt with a serious knee problem. The process of recovery was long and frustrating, but also turned out to be quite an education. As many dancers discover, what you learn on the way back can be as important to your health--mental as well as physical-as any amount of physical therapy.

I was lucky in that my accident--an off-center, hyper-extended releve that seemed to pop my knee out of joint--did clear, unambiguous damage to my ligament. There was no question as to what had happened, no real chance of misdiagnosis. At one meeting with my surgeon, a plastic knee joint mounted on a faux wood stand was placed in front of me so I could see exactly where the injury had occurred.

After four-hour reconstructive surgery and a week in the hospital, rehabilitation became my modus operandi. The physical routine, at least in the...

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