GABRIEL GAFFNEY SMITH: I remember the first day vividly when I couldn't get out of bed,
and I couldn't walk and things like that. It was a big reality check, because I couldn't
dance. And this was something that I trained my whole life for and it's never really been
work to me. It's always been something that I love to do and I can make a living out of
it. I first felt the symptoms, and I danced for three months before I stopped dancing.
I felt symptoms of numbness and I also -- weakness, and just kind of a disconnect between my lower
body and my upper body. After the MRI, I worked with the OSU team to help diagnose what caused
my weakness in my back to allow my back to herniate. And they have not only a dancer's
point of view, but they also have science and they have things on my side, saying, like,
"This is what's happening," from an athletic point of view, or a PT point of view, or a
doctor's point of view. Like, this is actually what is going on, so it's not just, "Oh, I'm
making this up in my mind that I'm hurting right now." No, there's something going on
and if I take a couple of days it'll be fine. If I wanted to come back to dancing and be
strong and be able to do the things that I needed to do, I had to start everything over
-- and that wasn't just dancing, that was lifestyle. It was neurologically, the pathway
that was from my brain to my muscles, I had to reroute the way that that was. Because
the way that it was happening was wrong, and that was the way that I got injured -- was
the way that I was thinking and the way that my muscles were firing was wrong. For years
it was very, very, like, teeter-totter. Unstable. You know, great days.... horrible days, you
know. And then, eventually, the great days started to outweigh the bad days. And I still
have flare-ups every now and then, but the difference now is that I'm aware of symptoms. The injury
has changed me as a person, not just a dancer, just because I have become more present
with myself, because I think with injuries, they happen because you're not present and
you're looking into the future saying, "I want, I want, I want, I want," instead of
just being present and saying, "OK, what is my body telling me right now? What do I want
right now?" Any athlete doesn't want to admit that, you know, they can't do what they're
supposed to do right now. You have to also listen to what your body's telling you, honestly.
And don't judge yourself. You know, you might have pain -- you need to go to OSU, you need
to start getting therapy to correct your imbalance, cause if you're getting pain somewhere it's
usually because you're imbalanced. And that repetition of dance is going to cause major,
major trauma to your body. And then it's a whole other ball game. Once something is actually
injured, you can't really ever go back -- it's just a matter of changing to go forward. I
would definitely recommend OSU. They cared about making a difference in my life because
they knew that it was important to me and they could see that this wasn't something
that I was just gonna take lightly. This was something that I had multiple people say,
you know, like, "You're done. You can't dance anymore. You know, you're not walking right now,
how do you expect to dance?" type of thing like that. And that, for me, was just only
just to fuel the fire. So that was one great thing about all the therapists and all the
doctors that I saw -- they knew that it was possible to come back from this injury. Where
would I be without OSU? I couldn't imagine where I would be right now because I'm actually
doing great today. And OSU was there for me.