Dancing Through the Pain

Last night I gave myself a dose of my during-treatment forced keep-up-the-energy dance-through-the-pain don’t-bring-other-people-down experience. I haven’t pushed my feet so hard in a long, long time. I’m seriously paying for it today (and probably all week) and I wasted several Nucynta on trying to numb the brain to pain after a couple tandas, but that’s not the point.

I think it’s been a little more than two years since I visited the SacTango scene. My feet had gotten so bad, and I had gone back to work and my hands were awful part-way through the day, so the idea of driving four hours to maybe dance a few songs just wasn’t one I could stomach. Then I started traveling in the RV, and next thing you know, two years have gone by without me making a serious effort to tango. I went to a milonga in Las Vegas, but I barely danced and they were more like ballroom dancers doing tango than Buenos-Aires style tangueros.

Last night I skipped out on the Capital Swing Convention to go to a milonga, and even though it basically meant I wasted a lot of money on the convention by missing nearly a third of the champions stuff I usually enjoy so much, I am soooooo glad I went. I think I saw everyone but one person that I really, really wanted to see, and I got to talk with Betsy and some other folks for a while to catch up, and it was just fabulous for that. These are the people that, probably without even realizing it, got me through treatment.

It’s really one of the strongest themes in my book (My Tango With Cancer, pre-release for Cielem’el readers coming soon!). Or it’s supposed to be. I want to make sure that comes across when I get to do my last edits when I get it back from the editor. I may have been determined to survive for the love of my family and not being willing to make them grieve, but tango is pretty much how I survived.

You wouldn’t expect it, but Sacramento has one of the strongest tango communities I’ve seen anywhere in the country. Numerous people I consider “real” tangueros & tangueras, capable of holding their own in a Buenos Aires milonga. San Francisco is also amazing, and then there’s a pretty big gap between the “A” students and the “B” students of tango communities, for lack of a better analogy.

SacTango was an enormous element in how much I tried to keep going when treatment got really bad, when the neuropathy took on it’s current status of fireballs or grease fire for my hands and frostbite thrown in boiling water with knives for my feet. You would think a person would pass out with that kind of pain. But every week almost, I would go through the mental push to get myself to go to a milonga to see my friends. I’d make myself put on the makeup and a wig, get dressed up, and go spend an evening trying to keep my game face on, for the most part covering up what was going on in my body to try to be pleasant and conversationally encouraging and engaging, though I didn’t dance a lot after the neuropathy got so bad.

But last night I did it again, and I’m so glad I did. Ach, it’s painful, but there is something uniquely personal and inspiring in good tango. The connection with your partner can become, as one of my favorite maestros says, “four legs, one heart.” More so than any other dance, with west coast swing being the only other dance that even allows the “follower” any freedom to respond or have a dance “conversation” with the leader. But in swing it’s more like hijacking the lead and making the leader wait while you do something he didn’t expect and then trying to smoothly get back in his groove. Tango is different. You wouldn’t think it would be possible to dance in a body connection from forehead to foot, but that is what you can often see in tango. The only way that’s possible is when the pair get connected through more than the embrace (which requires frame and form like ballroom but also a fluidity and freedom that would destroy a ballroom dance from the breakage of frame). And honestly, that pretty much only happens with the tangueros that have been dancing tango for years and years and years. We seem to have an exceptionally strong proportion of that in Sacramento relative to other cities I’ve tango’d in. Even so, in a night, I may dance with three guys where that heart connection is possible, and maybe three to five others where some kind of connection is possible so you have a very enjoyable tanda, and then there are several (more at the beginning before my body gets into the music and the groove) where you’re just trying to follow, unsure of where the guy is going or what he wants, and often unable to dance to the music because he doesn’t yet understand that. In San Francisco, the ratio seems about double of great dancers, and then in other cities it seems to be some fraction for finding good tangueros.

The great thing for me in Sac now is that I have a handful of guys that I know understand tango and with whom I generally can dance fairly well with. And sometimes, with one of those guys, I can feel his heartbeat, or, if he’s really perceptive and waits to feel either my heartbeat or my breathing as well as the music before he starts, well, those are the ones that can be utterly amazing.

The thing I did wrong last night is that when it got late, I was declining many requests to dance, but when my favorite songs would come on, I would cabaceo Patrick, my favorite partner of the night, whom I had the best connection with, and some of those dances were just plain fun for good connection, and some you could just lose yourself in the moment and the music. But, it’s rude to turn people down and also to dance too much with the same partner.

Betsy was asking me last night if dancing distracts my mind from the burning. I had to think about that, because the answer is really no even though I wanted it to be yes. I was on the floor with Patrick and totally in the connection, and also in so much pain I couldn’t believe I was upright. There were a few times I felt that burn rush all the way through me and I could tell when it got to him in the heart connection. That’s probably why I danced with him so much last night. I remembered almost always slipping quickly into a great connection with Patrick, and he was one of the reason I went last night, in all honesty. Unlike going to a milonga in Vegas or Atlanta or Houston, where it is completely random and pure luck if I find one good connection, I can trust that it exists here, and that’s probably why I’m willing to keep going through more pain that I can imagine.

You can be completely in the moment and also in tremendous pain. I think people probably do it all the time. The mother who fights through blackout migraines for the love of her kids and family, the athlete with the torn tendon or even a broken bone that wins an Olympic medal, the quadriplegic author who composes a masterpiece weeks before death, or pretty much anyone who’s climbed Mount Everest. People can fight through enormous challenges both physical and emotional, for something they’re totally committed to or can’t live without. That doesn’t mean it isn’t physically painful for them in the process, it’s just that they’re so driven to do what it is they want to do that they get there through the pain somehow. I guess I’ve figured out that that is what tango is to me. I spent two years struggling through each day just to do my job, and without living life, but recently I’ve been reminding myself what my life was about before cancer. My life, not my career.

That is changing, as of now. A new Cynthia is being born, and she is about encouragement and inspiration for cancer patients and survivors, not making money for companies with supply chain modeling and rate negotiation tools. That “professional” version of Cynthia is gone, I guess she was killed by the cancer in a way. I don’t really miss the old Cynthia now that I’ve remembered how she really lived to dance and I have gotten that back in my heart. Now she can go rest in peace while I get on with the living of life.