February 4, 2008

Out of bitter disappointment,
a new cause is found

When the curtain came down on Mamie Air's career as a ballet dancer, the Yale medical student found a way to re-channel her passion for the art form. Today she's helping future dancers avoid injury.

Mamie Air, a fifth-year medical student and former ballet dancer, received a Fulbright U.S. Student Program scholarship to study dancers' health care issues in The Hague.

Mamie Air knew what was coming, but that didn’t make the news any easier to bear: “You’ll have to stop dancing,” her doctor told her in 2003.

It felt like a death sentence to Air, now a fifth-year Yale medical student who trained professionally as a ballerina for 18 years. “To me, to stop dancing wasn’t an option. Dancing was my life. Is my life,” she says. “I had fought to maintain my dedication to dancing throughout my academic career, always juggling dancing and being a full-time student. I had been told many times before that I had to stop dancing and had always found a way to continue. I don’t give up easily, and I wasn’t about to stop now.”

So Air kept dancing, but the stabbing pain in her back and pelvis got worse. “Every step I took felt like I was being plugged into a socket and electrocuted,” she recalls. Air gave up running, using the elliptical machine and walking long distances. She stopped yoga and Pilates, dropped out of her spring performance and even stopped going to medical school. Finally, after three near-sleepless nights and days of chronic pain, she gave up dancing.

It took doctors five months after the onset of Air’s symptoms to diagnose the source of her pain: a complete tear of her acetabular labrum—the ring of cartilage that deepens the hip socket. Her best hope was surgery, but instead of providing relief, that course of action only brought more bad news. She had congenital hip dysplasia that had gone undiagnosed for 23 years. Because she had danced rigorously for 18 of those 23 years, she had advanced loss of cartilage in her hip socket. Her career as a ballet dancer was over.

While she recovered from her surgery, Air decided to use her medical training to transform her misfortune into an action plan. After struggling for years to satisfy the dueling demands of academics and dance, she found a way to combine the two.

Air is currently in The Hague, Netherlands, on a Fulbright U.S. Student Program scholarship to study dancers’ health care issues at the Dutch Medical Center for Dancers and Musicians, a treatment facility founded in 1993 by an orthopaedic surgeon and professional trumpeter.

As Air sought treatment for her debilitating pain, she found that most physicians lacked the specialized knowledge needed to understand and treat dancers. She doesn’t want other dancers to endure what she went through. “Therefore,” she wrote in her research proposal, “my interests lie in developing dance medicine as a field and advocating dancers’ health needs on an international level.” 

Her research will compare injuries to dancers in the Netherlands and the United States to determine whether improved access to care produces better outcomes. A related study will identify predictors of poor psychological outcome after injury, including pain, physical impairment, perceived artistic compromise, time off from dancing, ability to return to the stage and emotional support.

Air graduated summa cum laude from Rice University in 2004 with a degree in biochemistry. She has trained and performed professionally with the Houston Ballet Academy and Rice Dance Theatre. She co-founded her own ballet company and remains an active modern dancer and choreographer.

—Jennifer Kaylin

Photo by Adam Fuller

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