The Dancer

Frank Augustyn clearly remembers planting his foot firmly as he had done thousands of times before – but this jump wasn’t going to turn out the same as all the others.

It was the mid-80s and Augustyn was guest principal dancer with the Boston Ballet, performing in a dress rehearsal of Le Corsaire Pas de deux. This ballet required the use of hazers, which had leaked some oil on the stage right where Frank would take off for the leap. His foot slipped and wrenched his knee, although his momentum carried him up into the jump anyway, and he landed on his back eight feet away. It turned out that he had completely ruptured the tendon that holds the patella in place and his patella was now mid-thigh.

The Artist

Arto Yuzbasiyan clearly remembers setting up the winch to pull his vehicle out of the slushy rut – as he had done only too often that early 1980s winter – and in less time than it takes to tell it, he was looking at his crushed right index finger hanging on by only the threads of his glove.

Two Canadian celebrities, not famous hockey players or Olympic divers, but facing the same kind of career-threatening injuries and in the same urgent need of rehabilitation to save their livelihoods. Fortunately for them, they both had access to top-notch health care teams in Ontario and they were destined to dance and paint again.

The Fixes

Frank Augustyn is grateful not to remember much about the first hours after his accident, including the searing pain he must have felt. But he does recall being taken on a stretcher that same night to the plane that would fly him to Toronto and the care of Dr. Robert Jackson, the Canadian pioneer in the field of arthroscopic surgery. Jackson performed lengthy and delicate surgery to sew the tendon back onto Augustyn’s kneecap and he then inserted a four-prong steel staple to attach a Dacron graft to the shin bone. To this day, Augustyn still has the staple and the Dacron in his leg.

Arto Yuzbasiyan remembers feeling no pain as his wife raced him to the hospital and during the 90-minute wait in emergency. It was only when he was told his finger was too seriously smashed to be saved that the pain set in with a vengeance. Surgery was recommended to tidy up the wound – which involved paring off more flesh and bone, so ultimately he lost almost all of his right index finger. A devastating blow to a right-handed painter.

Recovery

Augustyn’s recovery was remarkably rapid because of the revolutionary new surgery and Dr. Jackson’s care and skill in performing it. For a full month in the hospital he worked with physiotherapists and other health professionals, learning to bend and strengthen his knee. When he went home, he continued with physio and after a few months he was able to get back to the dance studio.

A short nine months after the accident, Augustyn was back on the stage. He invited Dr. Jackson to his comeback appearance in Toronto, where he was dancing Sleeping Beauty with the National Ballet of Canada. Before the performance Jackson came to Augustyn’s dressing room and there Augustyn demonstrated some of the steps he would be performing in the ballet – steps he would never have been able to aspire to again without the diligence and skill of Jackson’s groundbreaking surgery.

Augustyn retired from performing at 44, a good age among male dancers. Most retire by 35 because of injuries and the extreme demands on the body of landing after extremely high leaps and of completing 200 or more lifts in a single performance. Jackson’s efforts had given Augustyn a full ten more years of dancing life, for which Augustyn will be forever grateful.

Before the operation, the surgeon had confidently told Yuzbasiyan that his middle finger would quickly take over all the functions of his index finger, including the most delicate of brush strokes. So as soon as he came back from surgery, Yuzbasiyan tested the surgeon’s prediction by picking up a pencil with his bandaged right hand, and even though his arm was solidly frozen from shoulder to finger tips, he was relieved to find he could already manipulate the pencil a bit.

It took a few months to learn to cope, adjust and compensate with his middle finger, in many ways learning to paint all over again. Although it was challenging at first, Yuzbasiyan insists that now he doesn’t even think about it. During the years that have followed his accident and up to today, he has painted prodigiously and continues to gain recognition across Canada and internationally. It turns out that by now he has contributed to many more collections and participated in many more solo and group exhibitions without his right index finger than he had ever done with it.

Today

Frank Augustyn is still totally involved in ballet, although now it is as Chair of the Dance Department at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. He has kept up his physiotherapy as a supplementary form of exercise to help fortify his joints and delay the inevitable onset of arthritis and declining flexibility. He reports being amazed at how many professional dancers – both men and women, and some as young as 18 – are having knee and hip replacements these days; he says it has become almost a fad. However, the good news is that after the surgery most of them, and especially the younger ones, have been able to come back to dance.

In this second decade of the millennium, Arto Yuzbasiyan’s works of art appear in many collections in Canada, the United States and a number of countries in Europe. His paintings continue to focus on our long Canadian winters and how we cope with and enjoy them. Not surprisingly, however, none of his work features snowbound vehicles or anything that resembles a winch.